Headlights2013/SiteRedesign

From W3C Wiki

This public wiki holds notes related to the 2013 Headlights task force on redesigning the W3C site. See the Proposal.

Thanks to the participants for their work! See #Meeting_history. Discussions on public-site-design@w3.org (archive) and irc.w3.org:#site-design

Questions? Contact Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>.

Goals

    • Identify W3C audiences and their priority needs
    • Catalog key resources available on w3.org
      • What we have (e.g., specifications, blog posts, etc.)
      • What we don't have and want
      • What we expect to live elsewhere (e.g., Web Platform Docs)
    • Ensure the W3C Web site:
      • Addresses primary needs
      • Makes it easy for different audiences to find key resources
      • Communicates the W3C brand proposition (cf related task force)
      • Communicates clearly the nature and impact of the Open Web Platform
      • Motivates people to participate and helps fuel activity.

Deliverables

    • Phase I: Create a Proposal; see Calendar
    • Phase II: Implement the new site (and any processes)

Phase I

This task force will write a Proposal expected to include the following information.

High priority

    • What is the vision of the site?
      • Community. W3C is a community of developers, researchers, standards professionals, and Web enthusiasts who are helping build a Web with a long-term vision of One Web for all. W3C offers a number of activities and services to realize this vision. The primary activity is standardization. Value of Membership.
      • Web The Open Web platform vision. How the Open Web platform is transforming various industries and why those industries need to be at the table.
    • Who are the primary external and internal audiences?
    • What are their needs? How will they benefit?
    • Scope of redesign
    • Budget
    • Timeline

Lower priority

    • What we want the site to do (stories)
    • Critical design questions
    • Implementation requirements
    • Potential sponsors

Phase II

What we will want

  • Work with stakeholders (marketing, business, systems, developers, etc.) to define & draft a website governance document (see website-governance.com)
  • Governance document should cover: KM: Added a few things that I've seen included in an effective 'governance doc'.
    • Business strategy/vision
    • Systems administration (if this doesn't exist)
    • Development standards
    • Content strategy (creation, maintenance schedule, workflows, etc.)
    • Design (style guides)
    • Social media & online community
    • Internationalization
    • User experience
    • Information & data architecture
    • Analytics
    • Security
    • Archiving
    • Accessibility
    • Legal issues (privacy, copyright, etc.)

Vision for the site

W3C Audiences

External

  • Developers and designers
  • C-Level audiences in diverse industries

Internal

  • Members (notably Advisory Committee Representatives)
  • Chairs (of all types of groups)

Staff Stakeholders

  • Developer relations team
  • Business development staff
  • Web Accessibility Initiative
  • Systems Team
  • W3C Management ("W3M")

Products

One view of W3C's main products:

  • Standards (and supporting materials like tests)
  • Venue for standards development (groups, Membership)
  • Validator service
  • Additional offerings for developers (webplatform.org, training, w3conf, html5 logo, ...)

Analytics and Surveys

From Google:

    • What are top 25 search terms?

From logs:

Home page questions:

    • Does anyone use mobile/print views? (low priority)
    • Does anyone use the W3C by region form?

Hits on pages from site redesign"

    • /standards/Overview.html
    • /Consortium/Overview.html
    • /participate/Overview.html
    • /Consortium/membership.html
    • /TR/Overview.html and /TR/tr-*
    • /standards/status/*
    • /standards/history/*
    • /standards/(webdesign, webofservices, webofdevices, webarch, agents, semanticweb, xml)
    • /standards/(webdesign, webofservices, webofdevices, webarch, agents, semanticweb, xml)/*
    • http://www.w3.org/Consortium/siteindex

Member site:


Not planning to ask given our setup:

    • How many unique visitors?
    • Where are we losing users?

Other ideas:

Surveys

DRAFT survey in surveymonkey


Notes:

  • Ian can do 1-1 interviews with Members in June during AC meeting (though we will need other data by then already)
  • Include in survey "Do you want to have 1-1 to discuss site?" (Can't guarantee, but can get data.)
  • We plan to use survey monkey (anonymous responses).
  • We plan to have a single survey and depending on people's roles, they will get different questions.
  • Bev idea: Offer a gift to randomly selected person for completing survey?
  • What questions are we going to ask once we have data (e.g., views of members v. others)?

Where we might find people to respond

  • Community Group participants (2500 people)
  • W3C Member developer communities
  • Information Architecture Institute
  • IAI Partners? W3C Partners?
  • W3C Membership
  • W3C twitter account
  • A List Apart

Analysis

See Survey Analysis Notes

Resources

Existing

Home Page News

  • Owner: W3C Marcomm
  • Frequency: Several weekly
  • Audience: Primarily technical

Newsletter

  • Owner: W3C Marcomm
  • Frequency: Weekly
  • Audience: Primarily technical

Weekly Digest

  • Owner: W3C Marcomm (Coralie)
  • Frequency: Weekly
  • Audience: Primarily technical

Twitter feed

  • Owner: W3C Marcomm (Coralie)
  • Frequency: Ongoing
  • Audience: Primarily technical

Blog

  • Owner: W3C Marcomm
  • Frequency: 5-10 monthly
  • Audience: Diverse

Wiki

  • Need skins in new design

Calendar

    • Talks
    • Meetings
    • Supported Conferences
    • Idea: make it easier for groups to publish their own calendars and aggregate them in the site calendar.

Specifications

    • Index (/TR)
    • Specifications themselves
    • Status pages
    • Clear indicators of status, done-ness
    • Integration with webplatform docs and testing

Mailing lists

Group subsites

Services

  • Validator
  • Other future services

Member subsite

  • Should member home page be a dashboard of an individual's view of W3C?
  • Do members use the home page? News page?
  • Relation of news page to optimized email strategy to members (e.g., batch non-critical emails to be once weekly)

Miscellaneous pages about W3C

Missing

    • Strong W3C brand story
    • Clear presentation of Open Web Platform
    • Clear presentation of all the ways to get evolved
    • Landing pages for verticals (e.g., auto, digital publishing)

Elsewhere

    • Web Platform Docs
    • Website Governance Docs:
      • online strategy
      • systems & software administration, hosting
      • online marketing & communications
      • online brand strategy, brand management, reuse, licensing, etc.
      • e-commerce
      • customer service
      • business development
      • online community & social media
      • content strategy, guidelines
      • translation guidelines
      • website graphic design
      • user experience (analysis/design)
      • information/data architecture
      • website analytics
      • website security guidelines
      • website archiving?
      • website outsourcing?
      • website accessibility guidelines
      • website legal issues (i.e.: copyright, DRM, trademark, privacy policies, etc.)
      • website information ethics, users, user data, etc.
      • website training, knowledge management, knowledge guildlines
      • W3C organizational needs and objectives
      • website size, metrics, performance guildelines
      • website team, roles, responsibilites
      • workflows, processes, models
      • website multi modal strategy
      • website multilingual & multimodal content strategy
      • content authoring guidelines, rules, style guidelines
      • pre-translation guidelines, global standards, etc.
      • website localization
      • internationalization
      • geopolitical policy
      • website updates, refinement policy
      • API guidelines

Critical Design Questions

    • Sponsor logos on the home page (links? limit to 1 year? how many ok?)
    • How to manage long lists of technology (e.g., see McMaster.com approach)
    • How to convey that new specifications are available (e.g., people still visiting HTML 4 learn that they should move to HTML5)?
    • How do we let people find specs fast?
    • How do we convey spec status?
    • How do we convey the power of the Open Web Platform (e.g., centralized space for cool designs, demos, connections to webplatform.org, ...)?
    • Better view of events (past and future in same view); not split like member calendar.
    • Clear communication of a user-friendly privacy (but one that let's us get information useful for the site evolution).

Notes on Implementation Requirements

    • Move to HTML5
    • Use of standards
    • Typography (especially for specs)?
    • WCAG 2.0
    • Establish importance of content in multiple languages
      • What are users currently doing with translations?
    • Mobile-friendly
    • Analytics? (may require privacy policy change)
    • Search strategy.
      • Internal: Custom search results
      • External: SEO
    • User testing (get 5 people to do 10 tasks related to HTML or CSS)
      • Watch over their shoulder (or use teleconferencing)
      • Q&A session after user testing can be very informative

Notes on Possible BizDev Ideas

    • Stickiness of various items on the home page (e.g., services, sponsorships)

Notes on content strategy

    • Cardsorting - talked with Shari Thurow about it.
    • What content will be centralized (e.g., through w3t-comm)
    • Getting shared vision in the community for the site's intent (for content creation over time)
    • CMS?
    • What content do we expect to centralize?
    • Distributed editing (in terms of responsibility)
    • Any tool that produces HTML
    • Org commitment to pages / maintenance
    • Glossary
    • Templates for frequently used information (e.g., templates for workshops, meetings, minutes)
    • Guidelines not rules
    • Iconography, iconathon, visuals about the Web, inclusion/participation. (cf SimpleScott)
    • On home page - query box for finding stuff like html elements, css properties? cheatsheet.

Notes on Preliminary Qualitative Brand Research

Research

    • "Describe W3C"
      • Develops, publishes and promotes Web standards
      • Does this in way that’s best for society
      • Improves accessibility on the Web
      • Sets the stage for the Web to evolve
      • Provides interoperability, openness
      • Process is based on consensus, transparency, neutrality
    • Strengths
      • Competent staff
      • Open, inclusive environment
      • Solid technology foundation
      • Offers framework for innovation (but not all agree W3C is, or should be, innovative)
      • Collective collaborative culture
    • Weaknesses
      • Slow, reactive
      • Lack of W3C Brand awareness

Recommendations

    • Re-evaluate W3C’s Brand Position
    • Do more marketing, esp. of W3C
    • Better promote W3C’s membership benefits
    • Address perceived business process issues

Notes from 2008 Redesign Experience

    • We wrote our own content management system. I don't recommend that we do that again.

Meeting history

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