Make the site more gooder

[DanielOaks]

It's been a fair while since we switched to the new format. It's about time that we had a re-think of the site in general and updated it.

Some general discussion:

I'm mostly trying to improve visibility of different clients and features, because most IRC users don't even know what's possible, or only see what irccloud can do, but think that's something proprietary

but then obviously theres irccloud that has a decent twitter+blog feed that showcases what irc clients can do too, that gets a fair amount of traction. i assume your quassel stuff will also be a decent showcase when you get that running

its all well and good to have a single place to push it, but showing that there are mutliple projects and a wider range of dev is also important to broaden the scope

But it’s hard to promote as a “product” when there’s loads of different approaches and focuses

i think for general updates and showcasing what clients can now do should be an ircv3 thing, since thats what most new features are based upon anyway. though i think it could do a better job at it than jsut tweeting things here and there imo

that would also promote ircv3 specs to irc devs

all things that have been mentioned before. removing the wall of text from the homepage, perhaps using a shorter 2 scentence "what is ircv3" paragraph instead along with a mini news/blog/whatever you want to call it of new things that are now possible using ratified specs. not too technically in depth, just enough to explain what features can now be done. secondaly, the roadmap. i can still never find this on the site. then links to the more indepth

info + support tables etc on seperate pages

just clearer, and small updates on a more abstract level for what ircv3 is aiming for and can already do. a lot of people talk about ircv3 in the scope that its to improve irc, but theyre not so so indepth with the protocol that the website makes any sense to them

but ircv3,net is the best place to explain simply whats possible now imo

The other thing is that we’re still not quite there yet with a lot of specs.

Def a more user focused side of it than a dev focus would be good

Its a decent brand to build on as a “product”

The other thing is that we’re still not quite there yet with a lot of specs.

this is one for the other things the website could probably show better. basically a callout for devs to try out things. theres the roadmap, sure, but its jsut a list of github issues that everyone glosses over

if theres any in a suitable position to actually trialled out and the majority fo us thinks its worth more focus over others, a callout on the website for it would be cool. even jsut to show casual readers that things are happening. i wonder if you coudl automate that via github labels. hmm

personally I’d even go as far as to split this into a user-focused and a dev-focused website

mixing and merging both is suboptimal for both target groups

mixing into the same page - yes. on the same website is completely doable though, and better for seo as you mentioned earlier

yes, definitely, but like matrix does maybe as separate subpaths. and maybe a subdomain on the same page for the redirector thing we discussed earlier

not totally against it, but i do think that may be too much out of scope for ircv3.net imo

[DanielOaks]

It's a hard split to make, looking at it from user-focused and dev-focused glasses. Definitely a better split that we can make, but figuring out exactly where that falls is something we'll need to focus on. Prawn's looking at doing up some general layouts and suggestions, anyone else is as well, and I can do the same on my side / turn it into actual code 'n' stuf

[DanielOaks]

On the user vs dev split... we should be using the 'Working Group' page for, it feels like. Homepage can be a user-readable overview (just nuke everything below the laaarge Open, extensible, feature-rich chat, proven through years of use. header, and replace it with a short intro to v3 section and blog/etc), and the working group page can show the actual developer-useful stuff probably.

[DanielOaks]

One of the things we could certainly do a better job at is making blog posts about new features and how they could be used in real-world scenarios. IRCCloud's feature blogs do an amazing job, and we should be doing something similar on v3 (on a more regular basis). Putting a link to the blog on the front page makes sense so long as we do something along those lines of presenting features more intuitively.

[DanielOaks]

I don't like how the mobile layout burger menu works, I can do such a better job with that these days. Also, switching the large-dang-header text from the two separate lines (for balance) to one single line for better line wrapping on the mobile view should happen.

[DanielOaks]

We'll definitely be better off presenting the "IRCv3 Features" and "What We’re Working On" lists as graphical ones, with large titles and the images off to either side that lay out how the feature works, for both graphical and console clients.

We shouldn't use real client screenshots here (just because of the difficulty of getting ones that look and are laid out nice, but instead we should have some illustrator layouts that mock up traditional console/graphical clients that we can modify as needed. This shouldn't be a big issue.

[DanielOaks]

Main features of the homepage should really be the tagline, a veeery short into to v3, and then going over features that we're working on with examples. Something like this:

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Nearer the bottom we can include some bloggy stuff and the three linkboxes (going to better places), something roughly like:

[DanielOaks]

Something that should be noted, right now under "IRCv3 features" there's... not a lot that we can show, graphically, to users. It's fine to leave those off main pages and to just explain those on the specs page and the like.

[DanielOaks]

We can probably also link each of the 'working on' image links up there to either a v3 blog post / page explaining it in more detail or honestly to the IRCCloud blog post about it.

[DanielOaks]

so one of the interesting things about this refurb is that we want to explain things more graphically, particularly for regular users who just wanna get chatting. having a few templates that we can bolt features onto and show on the site is useful, and it's important to cover a reasonable range of IRC clients in the process. might be cool to have each client adopt a different colour theme as well (console == light-on-dark, web == dark-on-light, etc to make 'em more distinct.

these sort of templates as bases to work from should let us make some pretty images for users to look at. useful for 'em to be templates like this rather than just modifying and screenshotting existing clients because this will let us be a lil more general and also let us give the images over as svgs and/or really crisp image files.

[DanielOaks]

On the suggestion "I’d even go as far as to split this into a user-focused and a dev-focused website. mixing and merging both is suboptimal for both target groups" I can get that, but... I reckon that keeping one site is doable. End of the day, what we need to convey to users is relatively simple and we can probably convey it all on one page, or (as in the mock above) one page with some links to external pages in the way of the explanatory blog post links.

The main homepage vs WG pages already try to service those two audiences, it's just that they don't do an amazing job because e.g. the main homepage tries to load the page with info, doesn't use enough interesting images, etc. We've already got a pretty reasonable setup, just a matter of splitting things between the pages better and making them easier to go through.

[DanielOaks]

Aight here's the console client mock, I've tried to use colours which go with the site relatively well.

[DanielOaks]

It's pretty bright and pink and I'm not sure how well the colours go together overall but here's an initial web mock.

[DanielOaks]

And a more traditional desktop client layout. Aimed to get somewhere between textual and hexchat, without including too many menubars 'n' buttons.

[DanielOaks]

Alright this is nowhere near indicative of the end result but it shows sorta where I want to move:

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I'll play around with using some full-page-width backgrounds for the elements of the 'what we're working on', try to separate 'em from the rest of the content better and make them feel more as a separate section/block. lots to play with :)