WarFoundry site navigation - opinions?

[IBBoard]

What do people think about the navigation on the WarFoundry website? Is it obvious enough where to find things? Are there any areas that should be more prominent? Are the right links in the header area? Is any of the text badly written/overly long/complex?

[IBBoard]

I'll give this a kick again in case anyone can give any opinions on the site and navigability. I've tried to make it useful/fairly obvious/informative, but I keep looking at it and wondering whether it could be tidied more, then wondering whether "tidying" would actually hide stuff.

So, any opinions on usability of the site or information that should be more prevalent than it is?

[snowblizz]

I don't see any immediate issues that pop put. Maybe you could make the contributors more visible, a direct link to the wiki for the team. Recognition is supposedly one of the motivating factors for participating in OSS.

[IBBoard]

I'm about to log off for the night, but I'll add that next time I'm online.

One of my main concerns is how accessible the various documents are on the Wiki. I tried adding the list of links, but I don't know whether they have enough impact for "I'm looking for X...there it is" and finding it quickly. Part of the problem is that different people will be looking for different things!

I should probably update the news page as well, since it is a bit out-dated by now

[Frostlee]

about the "i'm looking for..." i noticed that the Search button (on the green top bar) seems to appear and disappear: when you are in the homepage it's not there, but when you move in the wiki it appears (togheder tith the Tag button). maybe it's move useful if it stay visibile.

i also liked the "index" of the wiki beacuse it really list all the actual knowledge about warfoundry, but it could be al little more helpful formatting it better. i mean instead of by title or by date someting like "by argument" or "by tag" would make it really useful for finding what you are looking for.
after such work a more evident link to this index could be the answer to make the wiki really accessible.

also a must have for many site is a FAQ page and a site-map.

[IBBoard]

Thanks for those suggestions, I'll see what I can do

The search appears and disappears because it is part of the development system but not part of the main site. I did wonder whether the whole site should be Trac wiki pages, but they're a little less flexible than HTML. Maybe the main site needs a custom Google search or something. Tags are a plugin I added more recently, so it is the same thing.

As for the Wiki index, that's a built-in function of Trac, hence the slightly ugly appearance. It'd probably be slightly more useful if I could filter it to remove the default Trac pages from the list, so I'll look in to that. They'd still be available when you needed them (e.g. when you're trying to edit a Wiki page and want to know what the wiki code is) but not having them in the index would be good.

A tagged index would also be good, but someone (probably me) would need to go through and tag everything (plus it wouldn't cover the main site). There's a page of tags at the moment but they're sorted in a case-sensitive way, so you can end up missing things.

An FAQ would be good, but I need ideas for what to include. We already have a Developer's FAQ, but I agree that we need a more general FAQ.

Thanks.


[edit] We've now got "Search" on the main site nav and search page that'll search the main site as well. I'd include the Tags as well, but they're not useful for the main site.

The only other link that is missing from the main nav is "new ticket" and that's because it only appears on Trac when you're logged in and have permissions, but we can't determine whether you have permissions on the main site. Is it bad usability to take people to a page that says "You don't have permissions!" or is it okay because it lets people know they need to register/login to see it?

[edit2] We've also now got a linked "Thanks to the WarFoundry team" paragraph on the main page with a link to the team list. I've added Frostlee as well because he has been helping with questions and suggestions

[IBBoard]

Okay, Briggsy has been asking "what is WarFoundry and why should I use it?" so we've obviously got some navigation or content issues on the main site. Time to give this thread a kick and ask for more ideas.

Other than the mailing list page so that people can get notifications (which I need to add a more obvious link to outside of our forum post), what other pages do we need or what links need to be more visible? Do I waffle on in long paragraphs too much? Is there any information there already that is badly worded or otherwise needs improving because it isn't clear?