JoomlaWorks

A few comments on the newly released mockups for the redesigned joomla.org coming soon...

The frontpage of the site is missing many things. Let's start from top to bottom...

The slideshow navigation may be confused with the actual content being on top. A better front/back control would fix that. Also, titles in "italic" is really too much. The font is just fine to display "normally".

Moreover, it's missing important elements for newbie users and not only.

First, it's missing an "about" block. What is Joomla in short? If I were a newbie I'd have no idea what this site is about.

Newbies should also see a block with resources like: "New to Joomla Get started" and a list of things to do (what Joomla is, read the intro guide, how to install, where to seek help etc.).

There should also be only one block for news/announcements. Having stories dating a month back in your frontpage is not that good.

It's also missing links/buttons to the social channels Joomla has a presence on like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. A block with the latest official Tweets would not hurt too.

A block with a few screenshots would also be good to quickly show users of other CMSs what Joomla looks like, as it's one of those CMSs with a distinct backend and not one that mixes frontend/backend all in the same place (cough Drupal).

We have a great video for Joomla, called Joomla-la-la. It would be uber cool to have it there. Shows visitors that there are dedicated and fun people involved in this community. We're serious at what we do, but we're not M$ serious.

It would also be helpful to have a random showcase of sites built with Joomla. That could be a feed from the featured picks in the Joomla Showcase site.

As you can see, there are many things to add in the frontpage. The joomla.org redesign team could do that in several ways, without sacrificing height (e.g. using tabs or sliding panels).

Oh, and btw: the inner page/Forum page has the "active" menu wrong ;)

What do you think?

(this post was submitted as a comment to the joomla.org post as well, slightly modified...)