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The Neos Project Website
#1

A while ago new entries have been added to our website’s main navigation leading to a design glitch for certain resolutions:

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Thanks to @berit this was recently fixed by adjusting the collapse breakpoints. But now the main navigation is collapsed even for relatively large resolutions:

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As a quick solution I’d suggest to restructure/rename the main menu entries (IMO 8 entry points are a bit much anyways)…

In the longer run we could also think about a technical solution, i.e. zoom on mouse-over etc.

#2

Just an idea - maybe you could move the Contributing stuff under Download & Extend.
I know it’s important but I guess that the website is mostly being used by newcomers and they won’t want to dig into that stuff at the beginning. The others know what they are looking for (at least that’s correct for me - I don’t need the Neos page that often).
Maybe also Community could be moved to About. If you do this you should move the Meetups sub-menu to Events. Currently it’s under Community.

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#3

I like that and it would solve the issue for now for the most common resolutions:

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Any more comments?

#4

Can add some insights here, when we originally planned the navigation, “Events” didn’t have it’s own menu entry.

Now I assume that has been changed to make it more visible than putting it beneath “Community”, which totally makes sense but it’s a bit of a waste in terms that it doesn’t have much nested beneath it.

The problem of putting contribution under Download & Extend is that it would hide it’s subpages.

Maybe combining Contribution & Community somehow could make sense?

Also while we’re discussing this topic, I’ve multiple times failed to find release schedule information it’s under “Features” as “Release roadmap”, but I try finding it under “Download & Extend” -> “Release process”. I’d suggest to merge those two pages and call it “Release roadmap & process” and put it under “Download & Extend”.

#5

Thanks for your insights!

Good point and I think a 2-level popup menu is not a good solution. But maybe we could just have “Contribution” be a landing page that links to the respective sub areas “Development”, “Translations”, “Documentation”, “Donations” each with a little teaser

That’s also a good idea

Yes, same here!

I like - though “Release roadmap & process” is a bit bumpy. I’d say “Roadmap” is quite important and should get its menu entry (underneath “Download”, we could still link to it from /features.html). The roadmap itself could link to a sub page “Release process” for background information.

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#6

Picking up this thread again as it still upsets me whenever I visit the website and because a proper redesign of the navigation will probably take a while still.

To recap:
@david.sporer suggested to move Contribution underneath Download & extend and Community under About
@aertmann suggested to merge Contribution and Community somehow (his other suggestion to move the Release roadmap to Download & Extend has been incorporated in the meantime)
@berit wrote (in the #guild-website slack channel): “I could imagine to combine Community & Events, I have the feeling that Communit and Contribution have too different subpages”

I think all of those suggestions would improve the situation (at least for smaller screens / non-fullscreen-browser windows).

The current navigation structure is:

Features
  ...
Download & Extend
  Download
  Release Roadmap & Process
  Packages
Docs & Support
  Documentation
  API-Documentation
  Support
Contributing
  Development
  Translations
  Documentation
  Donations
Community
  Teams
  Values
  Meetups
  Social Media
Events
  Neos Conference Hamburg 2017
  ...
About
  Code of Conduct
  Security bulletins
  Newsletter
  Brand
Blog

So the following eight(!) 1st level entries:

image.png1347×111 228 KB

If we for example move Contributing to Community (which is not too bad IMO and it has a nice landing page so IMO not a big issue that the 3rd level items are not in the menu)
In addition we could maybe hide the Features item as they are promoted and linked on the homepage anyways. Lastly Download & Extend could be called just Download IMO:

image.png1345×84 205 KB

I’m open to any other idea that reduces the number of 1st level menu items. IMO the result will be more appealing and less confusing as long as we make sure to keep the existing URLs working. And we can always cross-link if we fear that people won’t find the content they look for right away…

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#7

I don’t know much about your site yet so I’m one of those newcomers without inside view. One possibility to improve the navigation (and/or the presentation of all infos) could be that you restructure the infos by differing more obvious between infos to the system and to the project. IMO this would make the site more clearly since most users should be focused just on one of both. Btw it could also solve your current navigation issue. I can’t suggest a logical or technical solution as I don’t know your needs. But there are several ways to do so.

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#8

I think that’s a very good point, thanks for your input!

#9

The initial idea was to put a lot of focus on presenting the product to new visitors without knowledge of the project. Thus the homepage is focussed around that. Hiding the “Features” would go against that and there are many submenu items there, which are not all properly linked from the homepage. Also can be hard to know the homepage is where to find that stuff if you first land on a subpage instead.

To cater more for first time visitors than repeat visitors was an assumption we made, which is not something analytics will necessarily be very useful at supporting since most visited pages will be by repeat visitors.

Just looked at it again and wondered if “Download & Extend” and “Docs & Support” couldn’t be combined somehow? I’d imagine the “Extend” and “Support” parts aren’t what most people would look for anyway. So something like “Download & Docs” (probably there’s a better title) might make sense.