Building landing pages for Drupal.org

This is the plan for building audience-specific landing pages on drupal.org. Calling all user researchers and content specialist: help us help site builders find their thing on drupal.org. Start with your thoughts on the approach outlined here.

Summary

The current structure and sheer amount of pages on drupal.org make it hard for people to find the specific information they are looking for.

One way to improve this situation is with audience-specific landing pages that point to the most important information and resources for that audience. The Drupal.org Content Working Group, in collaboration with the Drupal Association has created a roadmap and approach for creating these landing pages.

We made a start with the landing page(s) for site builders. We are looking for ux researchers and content specialists to help define, prioritise, create and improve the necessary content. A first set of actionable tasks awaits you in the content issue queue

Context

The amount of documentation and learning materials on drupal.org is astounding. We want drupal.org to be the best and primary resource for learning how to code, build, design, market and run your site with Drupal. The current structure and quality of available information does not live up to that ambition. People have difficulties finding the right content. This is likely caused by a combination of amount, variable quality, sub-optimal navigation structure and clutter caused by outdated information.

There are many ways to improve this situation: improve the content of current pages, restructure navigation groupings, demote outdated content, create better new materials, etcetera.

We think the most effective thing to start with is to create this new type of page that can sit above the existing pool of individual content items.

The project

By creating audience specific landing pages we can collect, group and present more focussed sets of related content that help people find what they need quicker and easier.

So lets build us some landing pages! The goal is to build a new page type that can serve as a flexible container for creating many specific landing pages. These landing pages will provide their target audience(s) with the best places to start their specific Drupal learning curves.

Having audience-specific traffic also makes for a better proposition towards advertisers. Part of the goal here is creating a revenue stream for the Drupal Association to help cover the costs of running drupal.org.

We'd like to see landing pages for developers, designers, marketers, business owners, etc. But we want to start with the landing page for site builders. An important audience that likely suffers most from the current jungle of information that is drupal.org.

The approach

The proposed process for getting us there is as follows:

• [Research]: find out what are people looking for, what do they want to get done?
• Requirements: what content, in which format(s) helps them do that?
• Content creation: collect, create, improve that content
• Screen design: create the structure that best presents that content
• Build: implement, test, deploy for real on drupal.org
• Improve: Adjust and improve based on analytics data, newly available content, module releases, etc.

The rough timeline

• September: research
• Oktober: design/build
• November: build/deploy
• December: improve

Cool, what's next?

Have ideas, suggestions, questions about the overall landing pages project? Probably lots more to take into consideration, so please do add your comments here.

We're kicking of the research for the site builder landing page, go there if you want to work with us on that.

Looking forward to work with you and start making a better drupal.org!