Mozilla.org Website Beta Final Call

[MrPixel]

Much, MUCH better than the last version I saw! I would change only one thing: When clicking on a menu tab, the tab should be changed in some way (color is a good choice) for the the page you are viewing, to let the viewer know, at a glance, where on the site they are. Other than that, I'm impressed.

[cameleon25]

On the developers page, the module owners item has a larger font size than the rest in IE6, messing up the page. Same problem in About->Press Center.

Also, there is space between all the items on the left side in Developers in IE6 that isn't there in Firefox and doesn't look good. The About and Support tabs have the same problem with the left hand menu.

The telephone support page still has the old design, but it is on another site (decisionone.com), so I don't know if that can be fixed easily.

[webmonkey]

The Skip nav at the top is good... There should also be one back to Nav skip navigation link after the content.

Great work. It looks very perdy! Color me jealous for not being able to make the mozilla site

[AnimeUSA]

To handle the users who are not English speaking, why not follow the example on the skype.com website? At the top of the page there is a row of other flags representing other non-English countries. The user could click on it and they would be brought to a navigation page of what languages are available.

<img src="http://www.exeanime.com/skype.jpg">

[sasquatch]

Calendar theme and icons were there, now they are gone.

[Foxtrot]

I have one comment, I think that the majority of people visiting mozilla.org are not going to care about PlanetMozilla, MozillaZine, or Mozilla.org news.

Perhaps those three items should be somehow made more obviously less important than the links above them (smaller font size, background colors, etc.).

Hear, hear.
I think the site is great the way it is, but when I asked my brother to have a look, he said that it was very confusing. My guess is that this is because of the large quantity of headlines.
If you could make the three news headlines on the bottom more discrete, then that would add to the user-friendliness of the site.

Other than that, I can't see HTML strict's advantage over XHTML, but I suppose enough people have said that already.

"Firefox: wired. IE: expired." doesn't really fit where it is. IMO it should be in its own div, maybe next to the download box. Oh, and many don't know what IE is. Maybe you could replace it with Internet Explorer? I dunno, just a suggestion.

[pinder]

i have a minor issue with the click targets on the main nav bar. if you hover over the right sides of the buttons, they become unclickable, however the hover still changes the colour of the button. i like buttons that have full click-targets. just a small GUI issue. a more extreme example is here: http://web-bloopers.com/gui-bloopers/Bi ... argets.php

here's a screenshot:

<img alt="moz_newmenus.gif" src="http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/misc/moz_newmenus.gif" width="367" height="47" border="0" />

[andkon]

I think investing more time and effort in the *content* instead of unimportant design details would be better:

Obviously, there needs to be more relevant content than now, but even with all this time spent on this new design, it has pretty big flaws. One quick example: there isn't a major Firefox logo on the frontpage AT ALL and only glimpses of it on the products page... Considering there's a really decent logo no, it'd be nice not to lose the logo... Another: the top right blue header bar has sticking out lines in IE6... Another: the frontpage links from one huge ad of firefox to another huge ad (why not *just* have features on the products page??) And another: "The safer, faster, better web browser "... Sounds like some infomercial...

The current design also hampers future improvement on content.

The list goes on...

[Codeman]

...

The current design also hampers future improvement on content.

The list goes on...

Are you never happy? Are you able to say anything encouraging? Like... "The effort looks good so far, but here's a couple pointers, what do you think of this idea, would you consider trying to...."? You may get a little further with people.

[coda]

Generally impressed with the new design, there is still room for improvement but for now it's miles ahead of what is currently up. Only suggestion I have is to add the product logos to their product homepages to enforce branding. And also I wonder if there should be a more visible "learn more about Firefox" link on the homepage? The graphic title is a link, as is the random screenshot, but not many visitors will realise this until they hover over either for the link. But I doubt they would even know to do that.

Also what about making the text titles of the other products on the homepage also graphics like the "Firefox 0.9.3" header graphic? That will make them stand out a little more against the others, i.e. "In The Store", "Announcements", etc.

Lastly, why on Earth is "Firefox: Wired" an announcement?

[sasquatch]

...And also I wonder if there should be a more visible "learn more about Firefox" link on the homepage? The graphic title is a link, as is the random screenshot, but not many visitors will realise this until they hover over either for the link. But I doubt they would even know to do that.

...

I've noticed a LOT of people need it to say "link" or "click here" before they even know it is a link.

[MechR]

It's been suggested (but oddly enough not repeated here) that the navigation tab corresponding to the section you're in should be highlighted (for example, if you're in the Support section, the Support tab should be lit up, just like it is when you hover on it).

[idearius]

Just yesterday night I was able to <a href="http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=756911#756503">answer</a> the previous posting on the beta website for Mozilla.org... but reading the final request for comments, as I do believe there are non-technical issues that are essential to the Mozilla project, here is an extract of <a href="http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=756911#756503">my answer</a> that might be helpful:

<b>Usability is helped by familiarity, and familiarity is key on any marketing effort.

A 2 or 3 year old design could deserve a radical makeover, but not one that's less than a year old... Not only you loose much of the accumulated knowledge, but you force users to waste their time learning the same thing over and over again.</b>

[wwrafter]

If you open different pages in different tabs, it's easy to see the pages shift, depending on what you're looking at:

The Firefox, thunderbird and mozilla pages line up with each other, but the home page and products page are not aligned to the same place.

[wwrafter]

The firefox page title is "Rediscover the web"
The thunderbird page title is "Reclaim your inbox"
The mozilla page title is "Mozilla 1.7.2 home page"

'nuff said.