Posted by webchick on April 21, 2007 at 6:57am
Here's a PDF that contains annotated screenshots of the home pages of joomla.org, dev.alfresco.com, and plone.org, including things that I found kind of interesting, or stuff that we maybe should try and borrow from (up for debate).
Feel free to post your own analyses here as well, of these or other sites.
My hope is that from this we can generate wireframes of what the main page of Drupal.org should contain.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| home-page-analysis.pdf | 536.41 KB |
Comments
GSoC and some remarks
IMHO it could be emphasized that Drupal is developing very dynamically, receives a great amount of students via the Summer of Code (joomla: 9, plone: 8).
Some remarks, that I liked in the schemes attached, and don't like on d.o:
news. way too much lead in news on d.o, occupies too much space on the front page on the expense of introductory material. or, like in case of joomla!, these news are strictly selected, important pieces of information that wont scare away any visitors by presenting too much detailed information
navigation: we have main navigation on top, but there are so many blocks on the page when i first arrived didn't realize that the top bar is actually the navigation. on all of the pages the navigation is somehow standing out of the layout.
forum: if somebody wants to follow updates on forums they should use tracker, or the forum page. not necessary on the frontpage. this lack of forum posts can be clearly seen on all the layouts in the pdf.
dojo, lessons: i think an improved (with more visual information) event calendar should be added to the front page with the lesson dates, so anybody just landing on d.o can immediately see when are these events.
Yes, clarification...
I chose these sites to analyze not because I think they are necessarily doing things 'better' than Drupal... just 'different' than Drupal. But all three have similar information that they need to present to users, so it's interesting to look at how they all tackle these issues.
aim
well the point is i guess what is the aim of the drupal website. to keep users updated, or to attract new users.
in my opinion the latter is what the sites above are doing generally well, also enforcing that for specific updated information (forum posts) the user should check the appropriate sections rather than the front page.
The aim of the Drupal website...
Is many, many things.... We have all kinds of people coming to the site, all seeking different information and different levels of information. So the challenge (one of them) is how to present that information so that each type of visitor can quickly and easily find what they need.
I'm planning to do this as a series... also analysing things like the documentation area, issue tracker, module downloads, etc. of other sites to cherry-pick ideas. But for now, focusing just on the front page and its utility. Remember that keeping existing users updated and attracting new users are not mutually exclusive... ideally, we'd like to do both well.
redesign case study for expressionengine
Nice rundown of the design process of the homepage for expressionengine, including several insightful wireframes:
- http://www.digital-web.com/articles/redesigning_the_expressionengine_site/
- http://expressionengine.com/
Like Alfresco and Plone it uses four horizontally arranged blocks to provide the relevant points of entry for typical persona, though here more focused on benefits. Would be a useful approach for the d.o homepage as well I think.