Abhilash did a lovely job on the new website, but while the layout has changed, a lot of the content hasn't. And I'm not sure what we've got lines up very with what people want out of our website, so I'm thinking about re-organizing.
Right now, I suspect that when people visit list.org, these are the things they want to do:
- Find out what mailman is.
We're good at that right now: there's good info on the main page and then links to features.
- Find out how to get and install the latest version of Mailman.
Need improvement here. Mailman 2.1 download links are good. Mailman 3 directs you to PyPI but then there's nothing explaining about how Mailman now is a suite and it's this bunch of packages. Also nothing about how you can use mailman-bundler rather than trying to make the magic happen yourself.
I wrote something up and put in a merge request, pending someone proofreading it: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman-website/merge_requests/5
- Find out how to report a bug
We kind of fail on this one, except if you want to report a security issue. Again, this is more complex than it might seem since there's a bunch of different components.
- Find the docs / get help with an issue.
The good: they're linked right there in the top bar. The bad: is someone looking at this going to know they want the docs for postorius vs hyperkitty? Will any of that make sense? I think we might need a landing page here.
We do have a "help" link and the "wiki" link in this area too, but I think a landing page could bring this all together more nicely.
- Find out how to contribute.
This is going to be especially gsoc students. We've got some nice developer links and yeay, this is one of the pages that lists out all the parts of Mailman! But we could really use a startup guide here.
We do have a nice Donate link for financial contributions, though.
- Figure out how to get in touch with us.
This page is pretty decent, with the mailing lists and IRC and all. Maybe if we had a "how to report a bug" page it should be linked here, but otherwise full marks.
- Learn more about Mailman
We've got some good resources: features, media, the code of conduct, etc. But probably we should group this all together so that it's easier for people to find the other important things they want without wading through all these links.
I'd suggest we keep the top of page links as they are, since they're super useful to people who know what they're looking for already, and have the left side menu be more about the guides.
But I think we should replace all the links down the left-hand side of the page with links that match up with those goals, so the menu would probably look something like:
- About Mailman
- combine all the about mailman stuff here, although we also want to leave the main page as is, so there may be a bit of duplication here.
- Get Mailman
- Links to source code and install guides, high level description of what to do.
- Help and Documentation
- landing page with a link to the docs, wiki and mailing lists, with instructions. Maybe some search boxes? Userguides go here too.
- Report an issue / Contact Us
- landing page with reminder about reporting security bugs, links to bug trackers, mailing lists, irc
- How to Contribute
- new contributors guide here, prefaced by the basic source/gitlab links
Thoughts on better ways to set this up? Other suggestions of things people often want out of our website?
Terri