[Bug 20180] New: [DIS][meta]Webplatform.org/WPD critical analysis — UX/style

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=20180

            Bug ID: 20180
           Summary: [DIS][meta]Webplatform.org/WPD critical analysis —
                    UX/style
    Classification: Unclassified
           Product: webplatform.org
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: PC
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: content
          Assignee: cmills@w3.org
          Reporter: cmills@w3.org
        QA Contact: public-webplatform-bugs@w3.org

This bug lists a site review, which has lead to a lot of comments on what needs
to be improved in terms of content and styling, ot provide a better user
experience across Webplatform.org

****************************
* homepage - Webplatform.org
****************************

Page design looks pretty decent.

A comment was made a while ago that initially the site purpose is a bit
confusing/unintuitive, so maybe we could update the text on the homepage to
improve this. See bug https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=19359. A
solution is suggested here - do we like it? Id so, can we implement it?


Main links leading off the homepage

*********************************************
* Q & A - http://talk.webplatform.org/forums/
*********************************************

This page is certainly ok for the moment; perhaps it could do with a short bit
of intro text to say what its purpose is, and give an ideas as to what kinds of
questions to ask

*************************************
* blog - http://blog.webplatform.org/
*************************************

The blog looks really nice, although it could do with a bit more content. Maybe
we could give someone the responsibility to chase the  Webplatform stewards and
other contributors for content suggestions each week?

********************************************************
* tutorials - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials
********************************************************

This is just an aggregation page leading to the different tutorial pages we
have on the wiki. I reckon this link should be removed or changed, as the
articles on those links aren't just tutorials, but concepts as well. It makes
sense to separate reference material from other types of article, but not
tutorials and concepts. They should stay together. So either:

    - Get rid of the tutorials link, and just have Docs pointing to all article
types.
     - Change the tutorials link to something like "Learn web design"

I would be in favour of the former, although it would make the links on the
homepage lopsided - there would be only 5 rather than 6. Perhaps we could
replace it with a link to "Cat pics"?

******
* More
******

This just leads to the same place as docs! Maybe we could get rid of this as
well, and just have four links, two on each side, on the main page for the
moment? That would mean it would be nice and symmetrical again, and we could do
away with my idea of linking to cat pictures.

***************************************************
* Docs - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Main_Page
***************************************************

Ok, this is the Wiki, and the main focus of this analysis. When you get to this
page, the immediate feeling is "hmmm, where do I go to find stuff". You then
get to the table and think "yuck, that's ugly".

In general, the whole site could do with a nicely styled dropdown navigation
menu, to make getting to different content sections a bit more immediate, e.g.
I want to get to CSS property references…

This page could also do with some nice icons/graphics, maybe an icon for each
technology type, and then a graphic for "Contribute to webplatform docs", and
one for "Stay in touch". Sebastien started some work on these, at
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=19386, and it'd be great to see
those moved along a bit further.

Note: "Concepts" on this page should be changed to something like "General web
concepts", as all the other categories have concept articles in them too.

Note #2 - it feels to me like the Search box is a bit hidden, right up there at
the top of the screen. It'd be nice to have it in a more prominent place, so
that it is more discoverable and usable as a way to find things.

Note #3 - the beginner's course should be an option in this list in it's own
right, and not shoehorned on to the page below those 

**********************************************************
* Concepts - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/concepts
* HTML - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/html
* CSS - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/css
* JavaScript - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/javascript
* SVG - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/svg
**********************************************************

I have lumped these five all in to the same category, as they all need to be
dealt with in the same way - as it stands, they all all scrappy, disorganised,
and inconsistent. We need to work out a consistent layout for these pages, with
nice graphic, concise introduction, links to subsections, and supporting
background information.

There should be another level of hierarchy for each of these pages - people
should get headings such as "HTML tutorials", "HTML reference", "CSS
properties", "JavaScript event reference", "Web theory", "accessibility",
"designing for the web", etc. along with nice icons, and summaries of what each
one is, and then they should click those to get to more landing pages for each.

Then a template needs to be worked out for the subpages too. A different
template will be needed for references, and tutorials/concepts.

*************************************************************************
* Accessibility - http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/concepts/accessibility
*************************************************************************

 This is really a subpage of what is currently "Concepts", but we felt that it
is such an important subject that it is worth having a link to it from the home
page too.


OTHER NOTES:

1. The topic indexes need to be sorted out, see the big list at the bottom of
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/svg as an example. These look horrible. What
we need to do is work out a way of auto generating these lists in a nice
matter. It has been suggested before that we have a system whereby each page is
tagged with information like heading, hierarchy level, etc, and from this, it
can be worked out automatically what headings to place each page under, what
other info to pull out and display, what to make the link text, etc.

This most desperately needs doing for the reference landing pages, for example
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/css/selectors

2. There is a sortable template plugin available on the site for creating a
nicer looking table of different articles, for example see
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/css/properties. This is certainly better than
the default generated list seen at the bottom of
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/svg. But it is still not ideal, and we could
do with more granular, structured lists of headings.

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Received on Friday, 30 November 2012 16:07:41 UTC