Visual design: site reboot

[meiqimichelle]

This will follow the wireframe in #64

[dmsnell]

This is how I feel reading this PR

[dmsnell]

With the amount of content that our website contains, it seems like it might be a good candidate for a single scrollable single page.

The reasons I feel this way stem from trying to guess what someone would want to learn when visiting our site. It's not particularly any kind of knowledge base; more like a billboard.

Maybe a couple of pages could be merited, but we have an awful lot of navigation for a relatively small amount of content.

A spent some time viewing some other brigade websites. A few of the sites have the single-page layout.

Some findings I found useful

• Link to Slack group on homepage
• Next-meeting info pulled from Meetup.com
• The "card" displays of projects.

Favorite Elements

• Sites with simple layouts and typography
• Sites with fewer disjoint pieces of information, but not necessarily less valuable information
• Well-done integrations: Slack invite buttons, GitHub issues
• "Citizen" bios with portraits
• List of projects whose descriptions are visible without clicking/navigating.

Other Observations

• Durham has a huge site with tons of contributors and information
• Code Island may have the best name of any CfA brigade
• There are many many sites but only a handful of themes. Many brigades appear to fork/clone one of a few standard themes and do minimal work on them. In other words, the websites do not appear to be a priority for many brigades.
• Many of the websites in the brigade list are missing, have errors that display instead of the site content, or are now spam pages for the domain itself.
• We supposedly have donated access to myBalsamiq via Code for America. This could be a useful tool for any visual redesign, but we would need to coordinate access to that benefit.

[dmsnell]

When thinking about some of the groups of visitors to our site, I anticipate a few groups:

• Local hackers who are interested in jumping into a project
• Do-gooders who stumble upon issues such as in the tech issue finder
• Non-hackers who have other valuable skills to contribute

As we work to focus our efforts as an organization on Communityshare and on Organizing Hackathons, I propose that we create two new visible pages on the website, something like What are we doing? and How can I help?. These pages would emphasize the focus and mapping skills/interests with our current needs, efficiently guiding new visitors to where they can help out.

[dmsnell]

Notes from Google Analytics

• Our traffic comes almost entirely (79%) from meetup.com and free-share-buttons.blogspot.com (presumably a spam-blog that has not been removed from Blogspot). We have a couple of hits in the past month from github and a couple from search engines. The bounce rate from meetup.com is 62.5% at 2.5 average pages per session.
• Visitors appear to navigate most frequently from the home page to the projects page, 62% of the time at least.
• We have a surprising number of hits from within the UK, but it's possible that this might be related to the spam coming over from blogspot.
• Chrome has a near monopoly on the browser metrics.
• 86% of our visits last less than 10 seconds. 84% of our visits only view a single page. We apparently have a big mismatch between the reasons people find our site and the goals they have when viewing it.