New Mozilla.org Design is Live!
It's up! The new design for Mozilla.org by Daniel Burka, myself, and the others here at silverorange, working with the brilliant and patient people at the Mozilla Foundation has just gone live.
Here's the CVS checkin:
dbaron%dbaron.org - 2004-08-31 14:31
Landing BETA_20040721_BRANCH: new template, homepage, and product page design by Steven Garrity and Daniel Burka from silverorange, and required tools changes by Myk Melez.
Be sure to refresh! Thanks to all involved (especially bart, dbaron, and myk).
Of course, there is still lots to do to improve the site, and we'll keep working on it - but for now, it feels good to be live.
The download link on the Firefox product page is way too small and hard to find, what happened to the big green button? :)
By the way, the "New Website Launches" announcement is a direct link to Silver Orange's website; unless I'm missing something here, shouldn't it link to an announcement about the redesign first (and from there, to silverorange.com)?
Anyway, kudos for the great work again.
That looks awesome. I love you you've got the big thing with firefox on the main page.
Great jorb!
The site looks much clearer and easier to use. It also has a fresh, breezy feel to it with the blue shades.
Excellent job!
The Firefox and Thunderbird promo button pages have big, ugly borders surrounding the images. The effect's not that great, but it's particularly bad because the provided HTML code uses border="0", so it's immediately obvious we aren't even using the code we suggest others use. (still trivial, but not pretty)
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/buttons.html
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/buttons.html
Incidentally, is there any reason you haven't disabled borders on all images inside links? I couldn't find any images in links with borders at a quick glance at mozilla.org.
To ease browsing, the Mozilla Store and Bugzilla should have links back to http://www.mozilla.org/, and maybe all the pages should have a (It seems confusing that the root page http://www.mozilla.org/ is the hardest to get to. Is it just fluff? Or are you implying that http://www.mozilla.org/products/ is the real home page?)
Unfortunately, it suffers from some glitches on Konqueror, even on the latest 3.3. If you'd like to, we'd be glad to help you in trying to fix those. If interested, let me know through e-mail.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html
What mozilla.org needs now, is a thorough walkthrough of its information architecture. Brett Donalds complaint illustrate this point. The Firefox-project page isn't navigable from the projects page. To get to mozilla.org/projects/ i first have to go to mozilla.org/developer. Do i have to be a developer of mozilla related code to be interesting in upcoming features and proposed release dates for coming versions of Firefox (e.g. the roadmap)? I tend to disagree...
Mozilla.org also needs to communicate its information architecture in a better way by adding a navigable breadcrumb-trail. Today your mostly stuck with searching and then hacking urls to be able to navigate the site succesfully. For instance the Firefox roadmap gives the user no visual navigating option to go the Firefox projects. You have to hack the URL to go to the project-homepage. There should be a navigable breadcrumb trail equal to the URL to let users navigate to levels above their current level in the information architecture. The breadcrumb-trail for the Firefox Roadmap should be: "Home -> Projects -> Firefox -> Roadmap". Why? Because most users don't hack URLs, heck they don't even now what an URL is.
a link like "Free software" could be better...
Maybe this would be better served with an animation that blends through the images (using flash?)...
This is a navigation issue, which is why I'm mentioning it here. I should be able to navigate to /projects/firefox without hacking the URL.
