Do we stick with the standard "About Us", "Products", "Community", or should we experiment with different formulas ("Who We Are", "What We Make", "What We Believe In"...)?

I like this idea a lot. It sounds more modern and less "sterile business like" than "About Us, Products, Community". The latter makes me think there should be an "Investor Relations" section next.

I would also throw out for consideration a "Things We Do" section. This way we could describe activities the community as a whole does, highlighting the non-programming activities like promo, translations, bug trialing, testing, documentation, going to fun gatherings, etc. In other words, have the home page make it as easy as possible for newcomers to think "wow that sounds easy & fun! I'd like to help!" For simplicity's sake, it can lead to the "Get Involved" subsection, of course, but seems to fit better with the idea of the examples given for renaming the sections.

Also, not sure what task this should go in, but we have the concept of "KDE Store" listed twice on the home page: once for the merch store, and one for K Get Hot New Stuff (i.e. store.kde.org) in the footer at the bottom right below. The merch store says "Visit the KDE Mega Store" and right immediately below it in the next section says "KDE Store" - the latter being the OpenDesktop site. This is likely confusing to visitors.

The Meta Store section should be renamed "KDE gear" or "KDE Merchandise" or some similar (but perhaps more enticing) name.

"Who We Are", "What We Make", "What We Believe In".

The same information could be expressed as Community, Software, Values.

This doubles as a tagline which calls attention to the core pillars of KDE.

About us? We are a community. We don't sell products - we make free software that anyone can use to create and communicate. What do we believe in? The core values that bring us together and drive us to volunteer our time.

"Get Involved" should stay in the header. An alternative wording might be "Help Out." Other possibilities send the wrong message. "Join" might come on too strongly with a values-oriented front page, and "contribute" is often used to mean giving money.

Perhaps instead of a traditional navigation header, these "pillars" could be scrolled through as visitors move down the page, with a few lines which link to more detailed information. This would look very sleek and modern on the right background images, and it would align with Plasma's goal of platform convergence.

Another possible layout would be to maintain a header for more utilitarian concerns while the "pillars" or core information goes into three main points at the start of the page body. This is how Firefox and LibreOffice currently do it, among others.

Either way, the point of these layout suggestions is to avoid the confusing nested menus we see on the current e.V. site while focusing attention on what makes KDE different from any other team of software developers floating around the internet.

Either way, the point of these layout suggestions is to avoid the confusing nested menus we see on the current e.V. site while focusing attention on what makes KDE different from any other team of software developers floating around the internet.

Yep, you got it.

I won't quote or comment on all the suggestions now because we're still kind of early in the process of collecting/discussing them, but this sentence perfectly summarizes what I was aiming at. So let's all keep that in mind when suggesting changes.

The Meta Store section should be renamed "KDE gear" or "KDE Merchandise" or some similar (but perhaps more enticing) name.

Totally agreed on this. "MetaStore" makes no sense and seems to be named such only because of the even more misnamed "KDE Store," which is definitely not host to commercial software. Both should be renamed to more accurately reflect their purpose.

Just to put some historical reference: "MetaStore" predates the rename

In T7847#125796, @davidc wrote:

The Meta Store section should be renamed "KDE gear" or "KDE Merchandise" or some similar (but perhaps more enticing) name.

Totally agreed on this. "MetaStore" makes no sense and seems to be named such only because of the even more misnamed "KDE Store," which is definitely not host to commercial software. Both should be renamed to more accurately reflect their purpose.

I think that the "commercial" part is not relevant for the naming. "KDE Store" is just our software store, following a known terminology.

I also think (but I may be wrong, the commit message does not say much: https://websvn.kde.org/trunk/www/sites/www/stuff/metastore.php?revision=1475937&view=markup) that the MetaStore page is just the collection of places where you can get KDE stuff. That's how I read the Meta- prefix, which then has a specific meaning that I can recognize. Of course it can be changed.

I think that the "commercial" part is not relevant for the naming. "KDE Store" is just our software store, following a known terminology.

The problem with "KDE Store" is that terminology would be more correctly applied to Discover. It operates as the central location where users go to fulfill their application needs.

The KDE Store on the website would be better described as a place for users to share desktop themes and widgets.

the MetaStore page is just the collection of places where you can get KDE stuff.

You are correct. There is no place to buy merchandise directly from KDE, so the site links to several vendors. I think that issue may be outside the scope of this task.

The reason I said "MetaStore" makes no sense is because a new visitor won't know the merchandise page links to other sites before they've already clicked on it. Many people will simply shrug their shoulders and skip over it.

When thinking about the amount of subpages/sections, keep the navigation in mind. Too many of those can easily result in clunky navigation, which usually means bad UX.

General rule in webdev is 3-4 clicks max for the visitor to find what they're looking for(even if they don't know what they're looking for). Any more than that and they tend to just give up.

edited 02/03 to do some housecleaning and stay within the task

In T7847#126255, @johnpaulding wrote:

There's some apps that aren't true kde, but partnerships and I doubt the teams behind them would be willing and able to just up and change their domain name, and that's understandable.

What applications are on kde.org but are not "true kde"?

Hmm, looks like I'm wrong on that. I thought krita, karbon, calligra were separate but a quick look at wikipedia says all by kde. (I don't use those progs) The sites for those don't make it obvious that they're kde projects which is a shame because they're large mature programs.

The karbon page on kde just describes it briefly and gives a link to it's home page which is not a kde url, but calligra.org/karbon which looks totally different and has no obvious mention of kde at first glance. It's seems like all the biggest and best kde software sites have been made to not look like a kde site at all and until you dig around in the menus, there's no clue.

I thought these were partnerships and that they were just using some of KDE's infrastructure. My bad.

Seems like there should be some sort of ever present page element that makes it known that it's kde. Just a small mention in the header or footer would do it.

Software by KDE

All this time, I thought they were just software that was included in the OS build like a lot of linux OSs include vlc, firefox etc.

All the more reason to have a krita.kde.org and pull the entire krita.org site over to it and do a 301 domain redirect. Doesn't matter if they mention kde on their page then. As it stands, it looks like a different entity to the newcomer.

Hm, I don't think it is within the scope of this task to migrate or otherwise modify the websites of various KDE projects. We should focus on how the main website should be structured, or we're just going to get completely sidetracked trying to fix those other websites.

Perhaps I should have been clearer with the task description. When I wrote "Which sections/subpages/subdomains should we have", I meant something like "should we have a kde.org/about page, or kde.org/blog, or should they be blog.kde.org...", you get the point.

We *could* start a project that will cover the entire community and fix those inconsistency issues, but that would have to be a separate set of tasks, and personally, I would prefer that to happen after we update the main website...

I appreciate the reasons for trying to improve things, but I would focus on fixing what's obviously not working. Having a separate domain in some cases it's fine, there are good reasons for that, and all those domains are in the hands of KDE e.V.

Ahh, ok, I thought the overhaul was for all of kde which is really needed for brand continuity. For instance, when you're on any of the mozilla sites, you know you're on a mozilla site whether by the domain or logos or just text saying Mozilla.

So I guess we're not doing anything with the subdomains either? Just kde.org and anything kde.org/*

I've got one. On many/all sites of this design, https://www.kde.org/applications/ There's a link right up top for workspaces which, after clicking to get it to drop down and clicking workspaces again, looks to be a link to https://www.kde.org/workspaces/ but you get forwarded to https://www.kde.org/plasma-desktop which has no mention of workspaces.

So from kde.org to applications - click workspaces twice and get to plasma-desktop which looks almost identical the kde.org page that you started on and you're still left clueless about workspaces.

"KDE Workspaces" is an old name for Plasma, few years back. What you see is a result of redirects. And yes, it should be changed, but the graphic layouts of many subpages of kde.org, like https://www.kde.org/applications/, is still the old one, including the menus. The switch to the new style (the one currently under construction) would have fixed those parts.

I've been calling for a website rework as part of the Onboarding Goal as well, so I'm glad to see this discussion. The Getting Involved page would definitely benefit from such a restructure.

I propose taking in mind the community goals when thinking on the purpose of the website. They could integrate like this:

• Community => Get Involved
• Software => Usability and Productivity
• Values => Privacy

If not already done, I suggest tagging here the people responsible for KDE's web development, to make sure everything discussed and decided is aligned with their current work and future plans.

Language at the bottom of the website on some mobile browsers gets cut off, by the social media buttons. In this case the social media buttons appear over the top of "Browsing in English (Language ....". This especially happens on phones or mobile computing devices with fairly small screens (e.g. iPhone 5, iPhone 5s etc).

So we need to keep this in mind when re-designing the website for the Mobile browsing mode.

Bumping this after today's discussion in the Promo channel.

The new website needs to give visibility to KDE applications in a way that's user-friendly. It needs to allow users to quickly and easily find information about our apps and download them to their computer, regardless of which OS they use.

The kde.ru website has implemented a sort of an "app store" - we should consider doing something like this as part of the main website overhaul: https://kde.ru/apps

Big thanks to @IlyaBizyaev for coming up with this great idea.

kde.org/applications rewrite is https://phabricator.kde.org/T10159
adding download information for windows, mac, flatpak, snaps, appimage should be a part of that

Oh, sorry. It kind of fits in both tasks; this one is older so I just put it here. Thanks for pointing that out.

I'm not sure about that still needs to be done for this task.