As I said in my last post, I really like the new redesign of the mozilla.org site. However, one thing really bugs me: the lack of an easy way for people to "get involved."
If you take a look at the old old site (cerca 2001), you can see the "getting involved" link on the side of every page. The Mozilla community encouraged end users to become more than just users, but a real part of the project. I know that personally, I would have no involvement with Mozilla if it wasn't for the "Helping with Mozilla QA" page and a nice, helpful guy named Asa on #mozillazine. Now, the helping with Mozilla QA page hasn't been updated since January, and more importantly, the "Getting Involved" link is gone. Shouldn't we be encouraging people to join the project and help out, not through the "developers" tab (where only existing developers will look), but on the home page where it belongs?
Also, Camino needs to get featured on the home page, at least on a version of the home page for OS X users. It was there in the previous design and deserves to be there again.
Posted by zach at September 3, 2004 9:02 AMThe counter argument would be that most of the users that Firefox is aimed at won't want to "get involved", and asking them to get involved might scare them off.
How did you get to the QA page initially? Were you just browsing around with IE, found the mozilla.org home page and thought "wow, I'll go triage some bugs". The "get involved" stuff should be targeted at people who are already using the browser, and they can be grabbed via mozillazine, via blogs, or maybe via the start page. With the huge number of users, you only need to get a smaller proportion involved to have more than enough.
Posted by: michaell on September 2, 2004 1:30 PMI've this same feeling, the get involved link and Asa's kind encouragement made many people start helping and this help is still appreciated. Well probably doing it a bit subtle is better since the recent changes on the project direction but anyway actively seeking help is still interesting and needed.
Posted by: Alvaro on September 2, 2004 1:57 PMI think the Getting Involved should be present AFTER you have started using firefox. put it on the start page (default homepage) That way it will also get localized
Posted by: Henrik Lynggaard on September 2, 2004 2:27 PMYES YES YES!
Getting involved is a key message and it needs to be on the homepage.
This is on my list of things to do over the next month or so. And it will be big - not just in the footer somewhere. It needs to have a showcase box.
Posted by: bart decrem on September 2, 2004 2:29 PMMake official logos easier available for people who want to link to FF/TB! I am just setting up a blog, and while I eventually found the "Get Firefox" logo after a couple of minutes of surfing mozilla.org, I eventually had to resort to google to find a thunderbird logo on mozilla.org.
Posted by: Kai on September 2, 2004 5:36 PM> The counter argument would be that most of the users that Firefox is aimed at won't want to "get involved", and asking them to get involved might scare them off.
Firefox users shouldn't arrive on mozilla.org main page.
Mozilla.org is not a commercial page, with hudge advertising for super products...
It's the page for developping Mozilla and other linked software. (Remember the "Download the code on mozilla.org")
If you want a commercial page for Firefox, use http://switch2firefox.com/ or better : http://getfirefox.com/