Install Jekyll and follow the quickstart doc. Context: I thought it is not maintained anymore, but it seems to be and since github pages runs it natively, I would stick with it, even though Ruby is not as widespread as 10 years ago.
Create some simple pages: According to what we talked about we would need:
A homepage with a short overview
A page like “join OSD”, “Participate” or the like where we describe how to take part in the OSD community.
A page like “Learn”, “Learning resources” where we link to articles and resources our members provided.
TODO:
Find out how to bend the URLs to keep the URLs of the old side intact. Maybe the YAML permalink parameter is enough already?
Find out how to list the resources (one long list? Subpages?)
Find out how to add external links (to jobs and discourse) to the Navbar, except we want to archive both.
Customize the theme, particularly adding our logo
NOTE:
There are many things we could hardcode or hack for slight gains in look or usability. However this is easily a maintenance risk. Ideally, most if not all we do should be based on facilities that Jekyll provides natively.
Hey, I thought it’s important to look at the website’s page structure and menus before jumping into visual design. I did first a rough map of the desktop view, then made a first suggestion below on how to make the homepage and the top nav easier to navigate and to move some stray elements to a more logical place.
Current website
Home:
Top menu (expanded below)
header img (not much info, takes up a lot of space)
3-column intro
3-column layout: Articles, Events, Community Calendar, Jobs&Projects
Supporters (weak button: Become a Sponsor)
Contributors&Backers
Conferences
Affiliates
Contact us (socials), code of conduct
Top menu:
Goals
Articles
Resources
Jobs (& Projects)
Events
Forum (Discourse)
Summit
Milestones
Other pages:
GitHub?
Manifesto (Could this merge with goals?)
Community Calendar
Footer:
nothing
Suggestions
Home:
Some general ideas and small improvements
Top menu (expanded below)
Remove filler header image, move first paragraph front and center
2nd and 3rd paragraph are their own sections with more weight, maybe add photos of OSDN at conferences, etc.?
Events, Calendar, Jobs: time-sensitive and engaging, sidebar maybe? design exploration needed
Articles: static, can come later
Section to support in multiple ways
** Supporters: button should be a clear CTA
** Contributors&Backers: add a CTA
Conferences
Affiliates
Contact us (socials): remove Code of Conduct from here
Top menu:
About Us
** Goals
** Manifesto (or Goals & Manifesto)
** Milestones
** Summit (is this page still relevant? do we keep it?)
Community
** Events
** Forum
** Jobs
** Code of Conduct
Resources
** Articles
** External resources
Footer
Create one to give an overview of the page map, and possibly link to pages we’re not quite ready to delete, but it’s outdated/clutter
My POV was to arrange existing content better before writing new content or pages. If there’s capacity to do that, even better.
Feel free to ask questions, and let me know what you think!
I like the suggested structure (about us/community/resources)! I do not know if we can/should rearrange the pages we currently have within the current design or whether we should focus on new/reworked content and a new structure.
Is this just for the website or are you all looking doing any rework on the forum? (: Would love to provide feedback for both if you are all open to it.
I think forum changes should probably go on a separate thread, otherwise it gets hard to follow.
Happy about suggestions on the forum (but these should be consider that we do run this on discourse, so possibilities for design/layout adaptions are limited)
@juliaro and I sat down this morning and worked on a concrete proposal. We were quite ruthless in getting rid of stale items – it makes our community look unmaintained, which it isn’t! Now we made it to 4 top menu items only and no subpages
The goal, as always, is to make it easy for visitors (new and old) to navigate our site. We have the following primary personas in mind:
a new designer looking to contribute to open source
a returning community member looking for updates (e.g. next events)
a developer asking for help (e.g. with a job post)
a potential sponsor who wants to support the cause
Btw this also reminds me that I wanted to update the Articles page for quite some time, but rather in a way that shows an essential “Open Source Design bibliography”. I have a draft which I haven’t really updated since 2021, but it would be easy to do so: Open Source Design bibliography.md - Nextcloud
re: Events: I would suggest to archive this and not keep it in the footer, either.
re: Articles: Could be a good general container for any sub-pages we add that won’t be represented in the menu. But we could also just trust on our own non-menu links.
re: Resources: I would archive “resources” and put something like “Design in Open Source Projects” (I know, title is too long – “contributing”, “join”…?) in the menu . There, we should provide a coherent introduction into most basic themes and challenges.
re: About us. Makes sense to me.
There seem to be serveral pages that need to be rewritten. I wonder which tool we should use for doing so. Github is not great for this, since one can’t comment, highlight etc. (basically many of the things that word processors have for a reason). Collabora office in our nextcloud, probably?
Yes I agree, Github is not the best place for it. I’m happy with anything these days. Currently looking for reasons to try out https://fileverse.io/ but of course I’d prefer something we all already have access to. There’s also your lead article in Google Drive, which still has the best collaboration UX. Do you want to set something up?
Would probably stick with our nextcloud (fileverse looks cool, but seems to need logins for commenting). The next steps I would suggest is creating a list of files pages that we would need to (re) create and create the corresponding files on nextcloud. Here is what I picked up from the plan, did I forget anything?
To create/merge:
About us (now including goals.md, faq.md)
How to join OSD (now including contributing.md)
How to be a designer in open source (migrated from @jdittrich document)
Suggestion: Probably to rewrite/edit or remove, due to being rarely referred to, and having few updates
Those are the big ones, yes! I think About us also includes links to governance, by-laws, code of conduct. How to join is part of that, too, and should pull from contribute/faq I think. (Not sure we really need an faq, it’s the forever question in IA I guess…
The homepage text needs another round of edits, and the resources could all use a big edit (could be a follow-on project as well). I think it’s more important to finish the “How to be a designer in open source” though, that will be more impactful that an improved database of resources.
Going through the resources, I think “about us” can’t pull well from governance, by-laws, code of conduct. These are more for community processes rather than for explaining what OSD is/does.
At the barcamp at FOSSBackstage there were quite many requests for resources and recommended projects. I am on the fence about this – I do not think that parachuting in as expert works for neither programmers or designers. We might want to explore design.md as a way to list projects that provide an “how to get started” for designers and are aware of design contributions without collecting and/or implicitly endorsing projects.
