The Mozilla.org Redesign: Round 3

The third round of designs for the new www.mozilla.org site have just been posted. It’s taken us a few weeks to complete this round because we made design changes based on feedback from the community and we coded the pages.

Design for www.mozilla.org

What we’re doing with the liquid layout was just not visible with a static image, so we wanted to have a coded page that people could try out. We encountered some technical challenges getting things just right, so we have posted three different coded pages for review.

Please take a look at these and let us know what you think. We are very interested in getting people to view these templates on a range of devices, including phones and netbooks. Any and all feedback is welcome. We’d also love to receive patches if you have ideas for how else we should be approaching the liquid layout.

Our Trip To New York As Told By Where We Ate

We did a lot of eating on our trip to New York. As we were going around I thought it would be fun to map each of the places to get a view of what we did. Unfortunately I’m not smart enough to use Google Earth to make the embeddable interactive map I had in mind. For now I’ve just got the screenshot below. It shows that we ran around a lot, although you can’t see the names of places, when we were there, what we ate, see pictures taken there…

A Visual List of Mozilla-Based Applications

I’ve written before about the number of Mozilla-based applications but just posting a number seems a bit boring. Showing a group of logos might make things more interesting, so here is a view of the applications from our Featured Mozilla-Based Applications page.

These are just some of the applications from the full list. If there’s an application that uses Mozilla technology that is not on the featured or full list, please let me know about it and I’ll update our information.

Live Action Cartooning

I went on a trip to Europe a few years ago and saw a statue in Vienna that reminded me of this cartoon.

I took a picture and meant to come home and put a caption on it, but I forgot all about it after the trip. Maybe it was the live action Transformers movie that reminded me of this, but I just found the picture and added the caption:

I like the idea of live action cartooning and think it could work for many other pieces we’ve done (other than the occasional chicken, zombie or pirate, most of the cartoons just have one or two people in them). So this one might not really work as a photo with a caption, but many others would.

Note: I wrote about this about a year and a half ago on the All Is Well blog. I thought I’d have enough time to maintain two blogs, but it turns out I never did anything else there after that post. I’m moving this over here and will try to post a bit more frequently about cartoons.

Feedback On Second Round Of Designs

We’ve continued to receive useful feedback on the www.mozilla.org redesign, so thank you again for helping us with this project. The second round has definitely been a step in the right direction, but comments made online and at the recent brown bag show that some more tweaking needs to be done (if you missed the brown bag, the slides and video are available).

My take on the comments is that we need to focus on two main things for the next round:

• Make the page lighter—the amount of space taken up by the header is a concern and there is too much content on the home page. We can make sure we get the right information above the fold by tightening the design and moving any non-essential content to a sub-page.
• Tone down any Communist references—some elements were added to these designs (such as the red stars) to evoke the original design of the site. Although these elements are not intentional references to Communism, they are similar enough to cause concern. We will explore some other ways to keep the connections to the original design.

The thing that struck me the most though was that people seemed more interested in talking about what comes next than talking more about the design. That feels right to me since this redesign is just the first step to making the site a platform to tell Mozilla’s story. There’s more to do so if you are interested in getting involved join us at tomorrow’s site planning meeting.