Webpage redesign team kickoff and ideas

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Hello all,

we are forming a new team around redesigning our main site www.theforeman.org. Our main goals for the first cut are improved navigation, brand new landing page, restructured text for more readable form and single place for news/blogposts. As part of this, we would like to come up with some short explanation of what Foreman really is in one or two sentences. This will be challenging I guess, bring your own proposals!

Open ideas are more interactivity on the landing page (description of features, screenshots, who uses Foreman) or redesigning look. In any case, we will not touch Foreman logo as we all love it, do not worry!

We have decided to keep our manuals as is, I am actually making some improvements to disallow search engines indexing old versions and I am proposing to delete ancient versions of manuals so it’s less confusing and generation is faster. But unless someone volunteers to improve our manual, we are keeping them untouched.

Also we do not want to change technical side of things - we will stick with statically generated site via Jekyll because it works fine. However I can see some value in enabling users to create blog posts (news posts) more easily, the current process (git checkout, rake generate, edit post, commit, push, review) is a bit clunky. However not sure how to approach this (blog posts via discourse?).

So far we’ve only had a kickoff/brainstorming meeting, anyone is welcomed to join our team. We will followup with next steps which would likely be identifying the new navigation structure. The curent team is @lzap @Gwmngilfen @Ori_Rabin and @terezanovotna.

How you can help? Join the discussion here, throw ideas, join our team (we will probably schedule bi-weekly meeting). In the first phase, it will be pretty much a design process and rewriting texts where anyone can participate, at the later stage it will get more technical (HTML/JavaScript/CSS).

Recording from our kickoff: https://bluejeans.com/s/a8DoL/

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For the record, here is our current Foreman explanation. Tereza figured out that we are actually missing “open-source” in there, good catch!

Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers. We give system administrators the power to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy applications, and proactively manage servers, on-premise or in the cloud.

Shoot!

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Maybe I can help in the technical part because I’m rooted in web programming, especially PHP but doing things from Wordpress to many different technologies.

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Action item #1 - Improving theforeman.org navigation

Here is a card sorting exercise. that should help us understand the information architecture of the site. This will 7 minutes to fill out. I used existing items in the Foreman navigation, but if you come up with any that we should add/remove, let me know! The card sorting site is collecting the results, but feel free to share your results and thoughts here as well. Excited to see the results!

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Thanks, filled in. I’d rename Community to something more meaningful, e.g. Project Forum. Also not sure if we should have 2 different links for manual. I’d perhaps point to latest and from it to older versions if needed.

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This probably deserves new thread, I can imagine people already ignoring this one because they might not be interested. Put some fancy subject onto it (like free present) :slight_smile: to increase click rate even more.