Top Nav Cleanup

[kborchers]

I would like to start a discussion about reorganizing the top navigation of this site. It feels quite cluttered and could probably be better organized. Also, important items like a link to our Mission/Vision or our bylaws only appear in body copy which I think needs to be addressed.

[scottgonzalez]

One option is to drastically reduce the top nav and include a sidebar on the home page. Another option is to consolidate the links.

I'd say the most important things are:

• About
• Mission
• Projects
• Members
• Getting Involved

Some thoughts:

• Join and Members can be combined into a single nav link.
• Brand Guide doesn't need to be accessible from every page.
• Meetings could probably move to History/Home/About/Projects/whatever pages.
  • This would affect the nav on meetings.jquery.org, which we might want to change anyway.
• Home can be dropped in favor of just using the large logo.
• Team (which should become just the boards and staff) is usually behind an About page.
• History can be linked from an About page instead of being in the top nav.

[kborchers]

This looks like a very good plan to me. I'll wait a bit longer to see if there is any other feedback then put together a checklist in this issue and then work with the content team to get everything updated.

[kborchers]

A couple more thoughts from me.

• I think About and Mission should be combined since what we are about is our mission. I am struggling though with the name (About or Mission) and the other items that would live below this page in a left nav (Board/Staff page, revamped History page, Brand Guide?). Putting all of those items below would make me lean toward calling it About but I feel like having Mission in the top nav is important. Thoughts?
• I think I would still like to keep Donate at the top level as well
• Would Getting Involved just link off to the contribute site?
• I think linking to meetings.jquery.org from Projects makes the most sense
• For Projects and Join I think there is a bit of work to do there
  • I agree we remove Join from top nav
  • The content on the Join page should have the project join info removed and only link from the Members page
  • Then, there should be a join link from the Projects page linking to https://jquery.org/projects/join/ which I think would make all of that cleaner

[agcolom]

Are we talking about the navigation from Home to Donate and keeping the top left and top right (jquery projects and the top right menus) as they are?

[scottgonzalez]

@agcolom Yes. Only the bar with the search field is site-specific.

[scottgonzalez]

I think About and Mission should be combined since what we are about is our mission. I am struggling though with the name (About or Mission) and the other items that would live below this page in a left nav (Board/Staff page, revamped History page, Brand Guide?). Putting all of those items below would make me lean toward calling it About but I feel like having Mission in the top nav is important. Thoughts?

We are about the mission, but there's a lot more about the foundation than the mission. Take a look at the about page for the Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom Conservancy, etc. The mission page should continue to exist separately, but linked from, the about page.

You can still link directly to the mission from the top nav even with an about page also linked in the top nav. The Mozilla Foundation site actually does this and they only have four top nav links.

I think I would still like to keep Donate at the top level as well

We can do that, though a clean design on the home page that links will probably not reduce the number of donations. I'm fine either way.

Would Getting Involved just link off to the contribute site?

Take a look at at Mozilla Foundation's Get Involved page, Eclipse Foundation's Getting Started page, and Dojo Foundation's Get Involved page. They tend to be high level views of all the ways to get involved, short on content with a high density of links.

I think linking to meetings.jquery.org from Projects makes the most sense

Sure. We may want to link to it from multiple places though, like Getting Involved (or whatever we end up with).

The content on the Join page should have the project join info removed and only link from the Members page

+1

Then, there should be a join link from the Projects page linking to https://jquery.org/projects/join/ which I think would make all of that cleaner

+1

[agcolom]

I'm on board with everything proposed so far as well. I like the idea of having the mission on its own page linked from the top nav. I'm confused by the current Mission on the Home page and the Mission statement on the mission page.

Brand Guide is already linked to from the jQuery Foundation menu (top right corner) so could just go and maybe be linked to also from the about page

[kborchers]

Anne and I met today to discuss all of this. Here are our notes. Please comment if you have feedback and we plan to start implementing this in a "revamp" branch on this repo. Once we feel all feedback has been incorporated, Anne will put together a checklist and as people have time, they can push changes to the branch and check them off.

https://docs.google.com/a/jquery.com/document/d/1JIjrtZw1al3dIGG4jw1HHbyWO2wET4A2tOSxrdXkOao/edit?usp=sharing

[kborchers]

I just gave foundation access to the doc. Sorry I gave it to infrastructure by accident before.

[agcolom]

A note was sent today to project leads to inform them of upcoming changes to the team page, as agreed in the google doc