Website redesign/Mockups/fcommunity.org

The vision for fedoracommunity.org

Fedora has a lot of local community websites. A somewhat recent addition to the mix is Fedora's local community domain program, whereby a local Fedora community can obtain a *.fedoracommunity.org domain to point to their self-hosted website.

In the midst of a thread on the advisory-board mailing list, it became clear that it would be a good thing to have a single place where folks seeking out their particular local Fedora community could go to find it, rather than searching in multiple | places for their community. In the thread, a Fedora Infrastructure ticket to this end was also referenced.

The work so far

Matt Domsch created | the barebones portal page for this directory that is up on fedoracommunity.org now, | asking for assistance in making it a nicer-looking site. I posted an initial mockup for feedback in reply</a>, and since then [http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/webdesign/fedoracommunity.org/ have iterated a few times based on the feedback I've gotten. I've been working with Sijis Aviles, who very quickly took my early mockups and produced a first cut at an HTML/CSS version of them.

A few design decisions have been made throughout this process that you might want to be aware of:

• Both national flags and national borders can, in a few cases, be quite controversial and stir up hard feelings so we did our best to avoid them in the design.

(The countries have been split up by continent because there are quite a lot to list on one page, and the continent to which a country belongs nor the shape of the continents of the world are not so controversial.

• We're considering using screenshots of each local site to help users distinguish between different communities that share the same country. Having the screenshots displayed on the screen all at once makes it a little cluttered, so Sijis and I have discussed using something like on-hover popup snapshots instead.
• This design uses the new Comfortaa font that the Fedora Design team is trialing usage of for a new Fedora titling font.

Mockups

Source

All mockups are contained in the following source file:

SVG Source for all get.fpo mockups (last updated 2 Aug 2010)

Front page

Notes for HTML/CSS

Discussion

• Máirín's Blog Post: http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/fedoracommunity-org-website-design/
• Thread on ambassadors' list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/014974.html
• Identica thread from 17 Aug 2010: http://identi.ca/conversation/46127665#notice-46480654 (not indexed below yet)
• Máirín's Blog Post: http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/fedoracommunity-org-website-design-progressing/ (not indexed below yet)
• Ambassadors list thread http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-August/015313.html (not indexed below yet)
• Websites list thread http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/websites/2010-August/008460.html (not indexed below yet)

Ideas

• "Is the box at the top just an image, or is it an interactive map? If you could mouse over or click on a region, and then get to the region-specific pages associated with it, that would be pretty intuitive." (Remy DeCausemaker, http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/015019.html)
• "Also, any kind of regional data, similar to the blogposts that lewk does at the EOL of the various Fedoras, with the heatmaps of downloads, and region-specific metrics would be kinda interesting." (Remy DeCausemaker, http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/015019.html)
• "I hope if there will be content for each Region or Country then there will also be the main-points from the sub-page showed up on the mainpage..." (wonderer, http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/015020.html)
• "I have some questions about the way the regions are split up on the page. Why not keep the groups of countries (continents) in the structure that we regularily use when talking about Ambassador regions? That being APAC, EMEA, LATAM, NA. For example in your mockup Europe and Africa & Middle East are seperate. The americas comprise of NA and LATAM. I do understand that splitting them up by continent makes sense too, but it would be more coherent with our existing structures IMO." (Felix Kaechele, http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/015036.html)
• "Even if the grouping by continent is to be kept you still might want to rename Asia & Australia to Asia & Pacific or something alike to make our members from New Zealand happy, too ;)" (Felix Kaechele, http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/015036.html)
• "And also it's funny that you state the following on your blog: "Both national flags and national borders can, in a few cases, be quite controversial and stir up hard feelings so we did our best to avoid them in the design." And right in that mockup the world map does contain national borders. Just sayin' ;)" (Felix Kaechele, http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/015036.html)
• " I really would like to create the hu.fedoracommunity.orgsubpage - if it's allowed to to have an place for events (maybe events registering), FAS startup, rss, blog, news, ambassador contact, aso... I am full of ideas. Opinions?" (Zoltan Hopper, http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ambassadors/2010-July/014982.html)
• "I would suggest a different order of those region buttons. They seem very confusing to me presently. I would expect them in the same order as the regions are in the map above. That means “Americas -> Europe -> Africa -> Asia”. Maybe Africa and Europe swapped, that doesn’t matter, even though the first order is more expected by visitors. I don’t want to have them sorted by “importance” or whatnot. But the order should follow some pattern (and I haven’t found one in current order). Button order following map order seem reasonable (and intuitive) for me." (Kamil Páral, http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/fedoracommunity-org-website-design/#comment-6270)
• "It looks too “enterprisey”." (Giovanni, http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/fedoracommunity-org-website-design/#comment-6373)