We (OSS Watch) will shortly be redesigning our website and so we have been thinking about websites that we like and trying to identify aspects that we might incorporate in our new website design.
So, we are maintaining a list of the sites we like and will be adding ideas as they come up.
1. Websites
Home page has a cluster of friendly icons representing subject areas, and clicking on them leads to similar little crops of links. Good for grazing.
- Clearly defined sections
- Many ways to get to new or interesting content
- Changing topic focus.
- Interaction with the user - polls, fun facts, ask us a question
- Newsletter sign up
- Big and colourful
- Context sensitive menus
- Routes to get deeper into a topic
- Collating multiple information sources
Filtered list of opinion and comment
- Clean and neat Big banner for hot news
- News clearly separated form info
- Navigate by action or topic
- Contextualised menus
http://www.slackbook.org/html/book.html
All info in one place
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml
Step by step guidance
- White background, the colour is in the text and section lines, makes for very clear reading
- Colour coding of sections - red for news, pink for culture, green for sport etc
* On a Guardian article page
- Article history is a clickable link so it does not distract form the content
- Breadcrumb trail at the top
- Title is followed by sub-title of a couple of key points from article
- Text is very clear with no distractions in the body text
- Related info appears both on the RHS and at the bottom of the page
Two tier contextual menu at the top
- Simplicity
- Big bold graphics take you to different sections of the site
- Information is tailored to different communities: developers, customers, partners
- Good mix of permanent content, regularly updated sections, space for interaction with users
- Straightforward navigation, design simple and neat, little information 'noise'.
http://mono-project.com/Main_Page
Clean site using MediaWiki
- Custom skin sets this site apart form other Mediawiki sites
- Simplicity.
http://www.google.co.uk/services/
- More simplicity.
- Just an small icon, some text and a link.
- Information is split to avoid clutter on pages.
2. General ideas
- Add a digg button to share news or articles
- Add a del.ico.us button
- Rating system for articles
- Embedded presentations
- Embedded multimedia
- screencasts
- visitor comments
- customaisable interface for those who register
- aggregate newsfeeds
- Add an internal blog for team members. The idea is to post into this blog the things you are doing each doing: I am working in project A, I've been there, done that, etc. The blog is for internal use only and could include (using RSS) some personal blogs of the members of the team. It is a tool to know what is going on in the team and help each others (maybe someone already know the answer to a question you are currently dealing with).
