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Restructuring the website

Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 6:21 pm
by Wladimir Palant
Now that the website is easier to manage the next step is improving it. The goal is to make things easier. For example, right now the website menu has twelve (!) different entry points. Finding your way to the download or to the support possibilities should be trivial but currently isn't (people asking for support in blog comments confirm that).

I'll post a few mockups here and would like to have your comments. Here is a first one:

Image

This is how the new home page might look like - the first page a user will see when he comes to the site. Notes:
  • It is possible to start installation directly from the first page. Most content from en/installation is moved here.
  • Nobody looks at system requirements so they can be moved to a separate page.
  • en/getting_started (which will need improvements) is becoming the central piece of documentation, linked directly from this first page.
  • Screenshots are linked to under the demo video, no other links to the screenshots page should be necessary.
  • No link to en/roadmap, it should be better to link it under "contribute" - there it is more likely to be found by the right audience.
General notes on the site layout:
  • Some text or logo above menu should be necessary to make clear what this website is about. I thought about putting some short slogan like "be in control" there (along with "Adblock Plus" and icon of course).
  • There are only four top-level menu entries, these lead to pages explaining users their choices.
  • Support section will link to the forum (for questions and bug reports) as well as various end-user documentation resources (especially en/known-issues and en/getting_started). Some text on choosing subscriptions with a link to en/subscriptions is also necessary.
  • Community section will link to the forum again and the various blogs (releases/, development-builds/ and blog/).
  • Contribute section will be essentially a rewritten version of en/faq_project#contribute with additional links to en/roadmap and en/source. This page will also link to documentation for subscription maintainers and that documentation will in turn link to the particular web tools (en/tools).
  • The "About Adblock Plus" link at the bottom of the page will lead to a short description of the project also featuring a very brief (a few sentences) description of the whole Adblock vs. Adblock Plus thing. en/history really needs to go, nobody is interested in that old stuff any more.
What I am not really sure about is where to put information on other extensions - Element Hiding Helper and Diagnostics, suggestions are welcome. But other than that all the website content is accounted for I think.

Comments? Corrections? Suggestions? Somebody volunteering to write the text?

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 6:52 pm
by Michael
The new design appears to be an extremely useful update to the website, especially in terms of accessibility. I would suggest that the other extensions are listed in the section for contributors, as they should hopefully be the only people who would need them.

I am willing to write the website content, and had been intending to alter the current documentation anyway when the wiki was made available.

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 10:00 pm
by Wladimir Palant
Yes, Diagnostics is a very specialized extension, I don't think there is a link to en/abpwatcher anywhere on adblockplus.org right now. Element Hiding Helper is something advanced users often want however. But maybe linking to it from the documentation in the Support section will be sufficient.

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 11:03 pm
by IceDogg
No expert here mind ya, but to me Installation should include all the extensions that are a part of ABP's functions. That would be the first place I would look to 'install' an extension that works with ABP like Element Hiding Helper. You can at the very least leave a link to a page with them all on that page. Something like 'Additional ABP extensions' or something like that or 'Advanced extensions'. I look to install any extension that I know you make and is part of ABP (meaning you only install if you have ABP) I first go to the Installation page. That is only my opinion though.

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2010 10:48 pm
by alberto
Wladimir Palant wrote:Nobody looks at system requirements so they can be moved to a separate page.
I think still needs to be explicit that ABP works only in Firefox, Songbird, etc.

As an example, AMO displays a message if attempting to install in a non-supported browser. Similarly, Chrome gallery directly shows a warning text when browsing with other browser than Chrome.

How many visitors to the ABP site are using a non-Gecko browser? Does it worth implementing something like this?

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 8:54 am
by Wladimir Palant
I can do a simple user agent check and display a warning if the browser isn't compatible. Something like "Your browser doesn't appear to be compatible with Adblock Plus, please consult System Requirements." I see 8% Chrome users in the logs...

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 5:36 pm
by Hubird
Wladimir Palant wrote:I can do a simple user agent check and display a warning if the browser isn't compatible. Something like "Your browser doesn't appear to be compatible with Adblock Plus, please consult System Requirements." I see 8% Chrome users in the logs...
It would be a good idea if this warning (a warning) was also applied to the forum as we are getting an increasing amount of posts from Chrome users.

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2010 7:15 pm
by Wladimir Palant
Hubird wrote:It would be a good idea if this warning (a warning) was also applied to the forum as we are getting an increasing amount of posts from Chrome users.
Done :)
Will be displayed to all MSIE, Opera and WebKit users. I would have simply checked for "non-Gecko" but I don't want GoogleBot&Co. to pick up this message.

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2010 8:59 pm
by torben
a button is a good way, so installing is really easy and you have not to click 3 times to install ABP and then have to add filters....

btw. the color of the download button matters! ;) http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/06 ... -is-green/

Re: Restructuring the website

Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2010 8:54 pm
by Wladimir Palant
I've implemented the first part of the changes, more info and discussion in forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6147.