I’ve been periodically posting updates on changes being made to www.mozilla.org, but I haven’t provided much information about our overall plans and goals for the site. We just finished a planning meeting that covered a lot of relevant information, so it seemed like now was a good time to talk about what’s happening.
What is the purpose of the site?
When http://www.mozilla.org was launched in 1998 all activity occurred on the site. The community has obviously grown over the years and there are now many different sites that focus on different parts of the project. To reflect these changes, we feel that the purpose of http://www.mozilla.org needs to evolve to become a portal to the community and to be a place to host official content and policies.
In practice this new vision means that the site will go from being a home for over ten thousand pages that deal with documentation, news, advocacy and a range of other topics to a site with perhaps fewer than a hundred pages that mainly provides links and references to content hosted in other places. This transition was started a while ago (for example, by moving documentation over to the Mozilla Developer Center) but we’ll focus on completing this in the near future.
What changes are we making?
Getting from the old version of the site to a new version is a big chunk of work and we’ve decided that it’s best to gradually make changes instead of trying to update everything at once. Here are a list of several of the things we’re doing right now:
- Updating pages: We’ve been steadily making updates to sections (such as the About and Community pages) of the site to make sure things are up to date.
- Reorganizing structure: To reflect the site’s new purpose we’re going to change the top-level navigation of the site from Products, Support, Store, Developers, About to Projects, Developers, Community, Contribute, Foundation, About.
- Refreshing the design: We don’t want to redesign the site, but we think that getting some design help on the home page and the site templates could make the site easier to use and could make it feel more like the entry point for the Mozilla community.
- Reducing content: As mentioned earlier, there is a lot of content now on the site that should be moved somewhere else. We are planning on migrating some of this content to other sites and then archiving other pages.
- Selecting owners: In order to make these changes we’re finding people to take on all of these tasks. If you’re interested in working with us, you are certainly welcome to join in (just keep an eye on mozilla.dev.mozilla-org for discussions about the site and for information about upcoming planning meetings).
For more information about these plans, take a look at our planning page. I’ll also continue to post news and updates about the site as we make more progress. If you have any thoughts or comments about any of this, feel free to post here.
davidwboswell 
Exciting stuff, David. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out, and look forward to helping out (if you need it).
This is awesome. It is *great* to see focused, thoughtful attention directed at making www. mozilla.org an effective site. I imagine you will make some decisions I’m not personally fond of, but that pales into nothingness (well, maybe *almost* nothingness) compared to the importance of bringing this site into the modern world. I’ve got a couple questions about the ownership pieces; I’ll raise them later as part of working through the ownership for Activities modules.
Thanks to everyone involved.
I put some suggestions in the talk page: merge the downloads page, and kill the products page as the projects page is now so much better (which sounds like what you’re planning). At some point you have to PRUNE the tree and KILL pages instead of polishing lots of overgrown branches. Good luck!
skierpage, I agree that the separate Products and Projects sections are confusing and we should be fixing this soon (we’ll add Projects to the top-level navigation and redirect the Products pages).