Refining the mozilla.org homepage
Last week John Slater held a brown bag to begin discussions around reorganizing the Mozilla web universe. As part of this proposed plan, mozilla.org would become the central hub connecting all other sites… meaning that mozilla.org will play a much bigger role in telling the story of Mozilla, who we are, and why we’re here as an organization. To do this, we’re working with the Foundation, and the community, to refine mozilla.org’s homepage with a light redesign — making sure that the appropriate content is captured and presented in the best possible way.
With that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the following:
* What is the key content? There are so many elements to the Mozilla story that we can’t highlight them all equally on the homepage. What do you consider to be the key content, or categories of information, that should be highlighted?
* What are the calls to action? When people visit mozilla.org, what’s the main thing we want them to see or do? Learn more about Mozilla? Read about our projects? Donate? Get involved?
* What does mozilla.org mean to you? And how would you articulate it? It’s an evocative question that will probably be interpreted in a slightly different way by each person.
Thanks in advance for your input, it will be a big help as we start this project.
February 18th, 20104:54 pm at
Direct Links for downloading Firefox thunderbird and other mainstream mozilla software right on a sidebar. Make it quick and easy to get to.
February 18th, 20105:18 pm at
your recently visited sites on the bottom.
February 18th, 20105:19 pm at
To be honest the reason I tend to go to the homepage is to download the latest firefox. It would also be good to have add-ons easily accessible.
February 18th, 20105:19 pm at
Keep it basic. Don’t do anything that makes it look like Yahoo’s homepage. Maybe a link to your 3 most downloaded products, a few links to other Mozilla sites like the addons site, the forums or a help center, a search box and that’s pretty much it. Obviously at the bottom have some Donate, Get Involved, Contact Us links like most websites have.
February 18th, 20105:23 pm at
I agree with Michael, but also it should be interactive and dynamic, with social network integration, so it is always updating and changing with the times. In other words make it animated, but with real time updates, perhaps based on a planet, city or other such, always on, always evolving entity.
February 18th, 20105:25 pm at
I think having a central portal as has been suggested (presentation) and also a mind map of what all the Moz part are so people can explore and get to know what all the Div’s of Moz do.
I think you need to unify all your disparate sites and bring them into a single view through dare I suggest a portal… hub… staging post… whatever you want to call it.
You have excellent resources but it takes to long to dig through.
Improve the Search across all the sites.
One click to usefull stuff. Save usefull stuff to a profile.
Customise so you can choose what you want to see user, developer etc.
have a log-in for access across the network, collect assets under that profile.
But WE totally love what you guys do, this is just off-the cuff ideas.
February 18th, 20105:40 pm at
A Bing search box
February 18th, 20105:49 pm at
Keep “We believe that the internet should be public, open and accessible” and then howsabout allowing visitors to shape (personalise) the page according to the public, open and accessible initiatives in which they are most interested, and the aspects therein… encompassing Mozilla and non-Mozilla initiatives / projects. Personalisation along the lines of Netvibes or bbc.co.uk homepage.
Firstly, this might encourage the more casual visitors to play a while and really get to grips with what we mean by “open” (as counter to Facebook’s “open platform” for example), and secondly there may be some useful social graph style inferences and functionality based around the association of visitors with similar page personalisation. All subject to opt-in of course. In fact, bring in their FXN / FOAF info from LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, Twitter et al, and you can reproduce those social connections at Mozilla.org to bring real glue to our community.
I’ve also been frustrated over the years at the lack of marketing communications integration between open source projects. To the innocent bystander, it’s almost as if they are all afraid to support one another. Open source doesn’t just refer to some isolated licensing legalese, but also to a philosophy that connects all of us that believe in open, but Joe Public wouldn’t know it.
Lastly, on the basis that everyone out there can play a role regardless of their specific skillset, if visitors are willing to tick a few boxes describing their skillsets under a “what can I do?” banner, then we can feed back suggestions and news and memes to suit. Sort of a SpreadMozilla, or picking up on my first suggestion above, SpreadOpen… although having just written that we might want to look for a different turn of phrase :-0
February 18th, 20106:16 pm at
A NEW design a week/month… maybe based on a persona?
February 18th, 20108:12 pm at
It should be simple – quick to open so not too much in there so it is not overwhelming – I think sites need to go back to simplicity!!! … add the twitter on the main page.
February 19th, 20101:55 am at
igoogle is a good example page. But do people use that? Bing and Yahoo have there pages full and that’s not easy to use. So I think that the home page of mozzila is just right. When I start the browser I get a search field and that is excatly what I need
Don’t change! 
February 19th, 20105:30 am at
Why is it that only someone called “Mackenzie” suggests “A Bing search box”?
)))
February 19th, 20105:34 am at
i have just read these blogs, an no one said anything about security,on their websites,which yahoo had along with my security,i don,t know about firefox yet,i just started to use firefox, so we,l, see how it goes.i,m, always looking for new things to try,an i hope that i like it.an i hope that the main page is better then the one i had.an more secure.
February 19th, 20106:39 am at
You should have these on the site:
> Get Firefox
> Get Thunderbird
> Take a look at our other projects
> Take a look at our Labs experiments
> Join the community
> Get support
> Search
And some other stuff too. Probably a login/register button.
February 19th, 201010:09 am at
There is a “discoverability” problem with Mozilla’s web content. ….and it’s not as simple as using Google as a primary access method.
Thoughts from a community member: Direct links to the “Planets” (Planet Mozilla, Planet Mozilla Education, the forthcoming Drumbeat page, and any other Mozilla planet sites I’ve yet to discover) are critically important. But once there, trying to follow the various and sundry Mozilla communities through Planet Mozilla is a bit like trying to take a drink from a fire hose.
The Planet feeds would be much more usable if post intended for syndication there would each contain a line similar to: “Thaumaturgy is the Mozilla project to implement the mental telepathy interface to Firefox”. It would provide the missing context for people reading a post about progress in a freshly discovered project.
I’ve built a personal index I use to get to the Mozilla web bits that I use frequently. It’s at http://richard.milewski.org/mozex — but it’s NOT a general solution, and would probably be useless for someone with a different set of interests in Mozilla.. I think a better solution might be the multi-level tag could I describe there (but have yet to implement).
Please consider using the web page redesign as topic for a Labs Design Lunch. …It’s not a labs project, but the Labs Design Lunches do happen on a regular schedule and are carried on Air Mozilla, making them more accessible to community members than internally announced brownbags.
February 20th, 20106:31 am at
[...] musingT» Blog Archive » Refining the mozilla.org homepage [...]
February 20th, 20108:54 am at
I thought we would already have a good vision for the mozilla.org site, which we realized in the redesign and restructuring that we did recently and are still underway in working on.
What I think is even more important is to make the other sites fit better in that, and to not have a mozilla.com site in parallel that is actually the Firefox product site, and not a general Mozilla site.
February 20th, 201012:04 pm at
Good design requires reducing the amount of detail on your home page.
For example, have a single link to a Projects page instead of the current “Our Projects” section. That Projects page would then list all the projects without requiring the user to select a “View All” link; it would include a link to download the latest version of each project’s product.
Also, the “Latest news from Mozilla” should not be constrained to such a narrow column, apparently caused by the “Community Ticker” and “Get Mozilla Gear” sections. Perhaps the “Latest news from Mozilla” could appear lower than “Get Mozilla Gear” and spread across the width of the page. On the other hand, reducing detail means the “Latest news from Mozilla” section should be reduced to a single “Mozilla News” link to a separate page that has links to the various issues with more details about each issue.
Making the “Community Ticker” section a single link to a page with more entries would also be part of reducing detail. These three changes — moving the “Our Projects”, “Latest news from Mozilla”, and “Community Ticker” sections each to its own page with a single, simple link to each on the home page — would speed the loading and simplify maintenance of the home page.
Finally, make sure the page automatically adapts to different window sizes and monitor resolutions.
March 2nd, 20105:14 pm at
The key content that should be highlighted are the most important issues that are happening right now.
When they go to the homepage it should be like some of the other major network sites that have tons of people, like facebook, sign in. Of course this site is totally different and should be, it should feel like what it is, something bigger, that it’s holding it all together, and everyone is important and part of it.
It would be good to have some kind-of levels so people like me can get familiar with things, learn, and maybe find a area where they too can add something. New-be’s-LEVEL 1, Learners-Level 2, so forth. Have basic learning courses that progress with tests to pass on the next level. A great way for people to learn and get involved.
Mozilla is a organization that develops highly technical programs to use in the browser bar.
March 3rd, 201011:25 am at
to show that you make firefox, but also other browsers.
March 26th, 201011:16 am at
Yesterday i changed my Mozilla to the very nice looking Universe Motiff. But I have found that it can be distracting. How do I change it back to the original format. Thanks…Sean Jewel…..