AbiWord Web Site Redesign

September 24 - 26

Jared Davis

jared@aiksaurus.com

Discussion

Was it a momentary lapse, or a premeditated decision? In either case, telling Jared how to get CVS access to AbiWord’s web site is a mistake that Dom will never be allowed to forget. He’ll certainly be banished from the AbiWord developer community--if he gets that far, that is. I hear tell that brick and marLunch are already calling for a death by hanging.

But seriously, the web site has been a tempting target to me for a long time now. Awhile back (before The Great Crash), I had come up with a new design for AbiWord’s site which met with good reviews. But, this was lost with everything else, and so nothing came of it. Finally, I was just kicking the shit in IRC and idly asked Dom who managed the web site. (We’d been discussing Alan’s recent patch to add the back navigation).

And so, Dom (domWork at the time, I believe), told me how to cvs co www.abiword.com, and for the last few days I’ve been feverishly pounding away at the keyboard as a result.

Goals for the Site Redesign

What I found was that AbiWord’s web site was actually quite good. PHP had been used liberally to keep the navigation constant across the site, pages were pretty tight, and text-editors had clearly been used so I didn’t have to clean up Yet-Another-WYSIWYG-Editor’s sloppy code. Site maintenance had clearly been a priority.

Nevertheless, enhanced maintainability was still a goal. In particular, changes were made to make page-content completely encapsulated in dynamically generated formatting. This gives us more freedom to have a single change update the entire site’s look, layout, etc. It also lets us add some neat functionality like printer-friendly formatting options (which is nice for, say, the AWN pages.)

But maintainability was not a primary goal, nor was enhanced functionality. Instead, the major focus was usability. The current site, while great for developers, it is perhaps overly-complicated and technical for an end user to effectively use. A good deal of effort went into rewording instructions, for clarity, and shuffling “developer” items away from the main site.

But fear not -- the revised site does not “dumb down” AbiWord’s site. Rather, it promotes access to the features that we want users to be able to find. As one example, it is now very easy for a user to see how to submit a bug report. As another example, the download process has been simplified by filtering out downloads for other platforms, but these other downloads are still available. Moreover, the site’s functionality remains in-tact, and is simply easier to find than before.

In addition to usability, the site has sadly been growing and aging. Much of the redesign is actually routine maintenance in disguise -- killing broken links, adding reviews that slipped through the cracks, and cutting down on redundancies. This is the sort of common stuff that is just hard to spot on a day-to-day basis, and usually ends up waiting around for a site overhaul before it gets fixed.

Last but not least, aesthetics were worked on. The redesign sports a new look which I hoped would resemble the splash screen and generally look more professional than our current site. Whether or not I’ve succeeded is for others to decide, but the nice thing about all of this is that the look is now a completely dynamic creation that can be redone across the site in a moment’s notice. In other words, we’re not stuck with this design, and can easily create new graphics and a new layout.

Changes to the Web Site

Routine Maintenance and Drudgery

Removed broken link to Owen Stenseth’s web site on AWN Issue #2

Removed broken link to Sam’s web site (abi dtd) on AWN Issue #3

Removed broken link to “table of compiler capabilities” on AWN Issue #14

Removed broken link to “archive of pending patches” on AWN Issue #14

Removed broken link to “patch archive web interface” on AWN Issue #15

Fixed missing <a href=” on ‘list’ link on AWN Issue #22

Added links to four new reviews as per http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/July/0377.html

Fixed description of Vi/Emacs bindings howto from old “F12" command to config file.

Removed broken “irc logs” link from developers page.

Removed unused “abiword public license” materials.

Features, Frills, Aesthetics

[New] graphics, more professional look to entire site. Tried to incorporate splash-screen like look into logo and navigation bar.

[New] “printer friendly version” link on each page to generate printable form.

[Revised] download page now detects user’s platform, provides appropriate download links.

Usability

[Revised] navigation bar entries now focused at users instead of developers.

[Revised] main page, less technical terms, removed giant screen-shot for speed, user focus.

[New] screen shots page with enlargeable thumbnail images of the screen shots.

[New] “awards” page separated from “reviews”. More prominent placing of award images.

[Revised] cleaner “reviews” page format.

[New] user-focused “Services” section to maximize user contribution and quality of support.

[New] user-focused “Report Bug” page with description of how to use BugZilla to report bugs, link to bug writing guidelines, what to expect afterwards, etc.

[Revised] download instructions merged, redundancies reduced, made smarter.

[Revised] FAQ: removed open source stuff, better separation of problems into categories. Hope to expand on the FAQ as needed.

[New] page on how to install truetype fonts on Linux systems, separate from FAQ.

[Revised] Split developer pages into their own section.

Possibly Controversial Changes

Removed “Press Releases” section. Reasoning: the most recent “press release” is from February 2000. This does not look good, and makes it seem like the project is stagnant.

Removed “Writings” section. Reasoning: the most recent “writing” is from February 2000. Like “Press Releases”, this makes it look like we aren’t active.

Removed “The Store” section since nothing is there and it makes us seem more commercial than we are.

“Company” section has been replaced by “About Abiword” page in Information section.

Status

I regard this mainly as a “first draft” of the new web site. Two major areas that the site is not ready to go yet on are the download page and the development area.

The developer’s area I really haven’t done much work on, and for all intents and purposes it’s the same as it was before, just split off from the rest of the site. This is probably a good thing since nobody should get too lost as to where things moved to.

However, the download section is a little convoluted. Our current site has a LOT of redundancy here. My goals for the download section were to reduce this repetition and make the page a little more dynamic in terms of detecting the right set of downloads to display.

I will need to talk to someone who understands our current release/packaging strategy and get an understanding of where everything “ought to point” to before this can be made live.

Anyway, if this is well received, then I’ll talk to Dom about how to go about replacing the current site with the new one.