Some of you might have noticed that the website is getting a make-over which we are very happy about. Me and Kristoffer have teamed-up and first and foremost replaced the old wordpress theme with an new bootstrap-based theme. Choosing a new theme can be quite a hassle since there is literally a jungle of themes out there.
So we finally settled for a simple theme that was easily modifiable and decided to basically strip it and starting to create our own design. So while I’ve been doing wireframes for the next version of the website, Kristoffer have been turning bootstrap inside out and started to make the old content responsive.
We have also modified the architecture of the websites content and started to clean up all the different pages. When discussing the new website we have talked a lot about how to make the site more engaging and how to better meet our users’ needs, which have been super fun but is also a complex task. One of our ideas which we are in the middle of evolving is to create what we call “gates”. The gates will be pages based on different users needs and contain material and guidance we think the user will benefit from the most, as an example maybe one gate will be named “research” or something similar and be especially tailored for scientists and researchers. That’s it for now, if you want please leave a comment about what you think of the design so far, or if you have any ideas regarding the “gates”.
Information architecture-workshop for the new website :-).
I like the new design. Very polished and straight-forward. The “gates” idea for information (like portals) is a nice design philosophy. It seems that Crazyflie users can be classified pretty well according to what they do. Some are just “flyers,” others are “hackers,” still other are “students” (researchers). I’m sure there might be a little overlap but, in general, the categorization and bucketing of info will certainly be useful to those folks new to Crazyflie as well as seasoned fans looking for info they are familiar with but might have forgotten.
Often, on the blog, someone (usually Tobias) posts project journals (buzzer, traffic lights, rpm tests, Devo7 hack, etc…) I think it would be cool if those projects were grouped somewhere so as to make a library of sorts where people could browse projects to try out if they were wondering what to do or looking for a proof of concept or “starter” idea. Just a thought anyway.
Hey Chad! Thanks for the input I’m happy you like the new design :-) we are still not totally done with the new design but it’s definitely going in the right direction. Regarding grouping blog posts I think that’s great feedback and something we will definitely use, it’s very much in line with what we want to accomplish when developing the “gates” and also sorting out all the information on the website and wiki. If you have anymore thoughts and feedback please don’t hesitate to let us know it’s super helpful!