Webistes/Mozilla.org/Archive/Big Picture
This is a high-level introduction to what's happening with the www.mozilla.org site. There is more detailed information available on our planning page.
Contents
Site Vision
The role of the www.mozilla.org site is to act as a community portal and to be a place to host official content. Or to put it another way, we want to bring the community's personality back to the site and tell the whole story about Mozilla (not just part of the story about one product/project or one activity).
Recent History
In 2008, a group of community members took over planning for the www.mozilla.org site. The site now has a new vision, all relevant content is well-owned and there has been a lot of activity around updating the site to reflect it's new role. In 2009, we want to build on this work and evolve www.mozilla.org from a static brochure-ware site to a place where the community can come together to discover, talk, work and share.
Why This Matters
Revitalizing the www.mozilla.org site is important for a number of reasons:
- The community has grown and now covers dozens of different sites and there needs to be an entry point for people to be able to navigate all of the available resources.
- There is no other site that covers information about the entire Mozilla project and the site is the natural place to host project wide information that is useful to both experienced community members and people interested in finding out what Mozilla is.
- The site is a place to host new functionality that can help keep the community strong and cohesive as the project continues to grow. We've already seen people come to us with project ideas that they want to host on www.mozilla.org since they see it as the community site (the Mozilla CRM and Contribute wiki ideas).
What This Might Look Like
To get to the point where the site matches our vision, it is going to need to change. Looking at a few examples of other sites can help with our own planning. The following are sites that do a reasonably good job of cleanly aggregating information about a lot of related activities that are being created by big communities with various interests:
- http://whitehouse.gov
- http://etsy.com
- http://starwars.com
- http://wordpress.org
- http://threadless.com
Are there sites you'd add to this list (or remove)? Are there any examples of specific things you think we should be doing or things you think we should avoid?
Note: the current project to redesign the look and feel of the site will help us get closer to a new version of the site, but this is just one step. More will need to be done with the content, functionality and other aspects of the site to get all the way there.
Use Cases
The following provide some examples about how the site will fit in with and benefit the Mozilla community:
Firefox User
A Firefox user clicks on a link on the Firefox Getting Started page to learn more about Mozilla's activities. The person is taken to the About Mozilla page where they are introduced to the Mozilla Manifesto and learn more about the values of openness and participation on the Internet. A number of actions are presented for those who want to get more involved.
Experienced Community Member
An experienced community member comes to the site to look up the official commit access policy. They look up the information for the governance newsgroup to ask a question about vouchers for commit access.
Potential New Community Member
A person familiar with Mozilla wants to get involved, but doesn't know where to go to find out what options there are and how to get started. They come to the www.mozilla.org site, finds a link to the Contribute section and then drills down to find out the Community Marketing Guide and finds exactly what he's looking for.
Person New To Mozilla
Someone hears the word Mozilla and looks it up on Google to find out what it is. They come to the site and skim through the home page for a few seconds and then leave. They don't click on any links or download anything, but they have an answer to their question 'What is Mozilla?'.
Web Developer
A web developer who uses Firefox and Firebug to build and test their web pages comes to the site to find links to information about the latest trends in web standards. They find a link to MDC about Firefox 3.1's new features, a link to a blog post about the video tag and a link to an open bug about a new SMIL feature.
Potential Donor
A potential donor comes to the site to find out information about how their donation might be used. They learn that the Foundation runs several different programs and choose to direct their donation to education activities. On the donation page they find a link to the wiki and add some information about a FOSS-related course at their college.
2009 Activities (AKA How You Can Help)
Take a look at the list of projects that are good things to get started on for people wanting to get involved in the www.mozilla.org site.
