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.
