Sitemap for the new website

Hello,

Now that we have our new brand, we’re working on a new website too! This thread is to discuss what should be on the website, and how we can organise the content. Here’s what @ByteHamster and I thought of, so far!

Sitemap:

  • Homepage: feature list, screenshot(s), open source
  • Get support
    • User forum
    • Documentation (replacing our current FAQ & GitHub wiki)
  • Get involved: develop, translate, help others (= forum), donate, contributors list
    • For developers: how to contribute
    • For testers: Join beta, use GitHub/Forum
    • For donors: how your money is used Decision to be made still, so option not mentioned yet
  • Blog
  • Media kit: press releases, stickers, brand assets To be added

The website will be multilingual, just like the app (blog is the only exception to this).

We’ve also thought about some non-static elements: none of these or the 'cool-to-have’s have been implemented atm, with one exception

  • feature set: display titles only expand on click to display a short description see also this comment below
  • contributors list: pulled from GH
  • contributions graph: number of commits per week, over the past 6 months (next to a call to ‘join development’)
  • ‘latest release’ badge: display version number
  • ‘what’s new’ section, displaying a list of changes (as you can see in Google Play & F-Droid) [these ‘What’s new’ texts are limited to 500 characters] [connecting to GitHub every time the site loads won’t work: we can either have an ‘intermediary’, or use a “what’s new?” button that loads the changelog from GitHub after clicking]
  • latest forum posts
  • automatic GitHub username recognition: automatically replace @username with a link to the GitHub profile in blog posts
  • language showcase: section where a randomly picked language with 50-99% translations is showcased, inviting visitors to complete this or any other of the languages

And a few things are on the ‘cool to have’ list:

  • interactive demo/introduction to the app (with clicking areas)
  • strictly structured bug report form (issue on GH) [we’d need to find a way to avoid duplicate issues]
  • web statistics respecting users’ privacy: number of cliks (per time period) on the feature cards, and the number of pageviews over time [e.g. using Simple Analytics or Matomo - would need a server side if self-hosted]
  • a Mastodon share link/button [due to its decentralised nature, a user-friendly implementation is challenging: this exists but might be blocked for users as it creates a pop-up] Anxhelo managed to make this happen :smiley:

And some blog categories: blog categories haven’t been implemented yet

  • Release info
  • Changelog
  • Project update
  • Opinion (e.g. when we want to make a statement about Open Source & audio or sth)
  • Changelog

Please note that very few things mentioned here are set in stone. Any feedback, comment and question is welcome!

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I would make the forum and documentation section top-level menu entries instead of hiding them behind another layer. I think those two (=ways to get support) are basically the main purpose of the website and should therefore be prominent.

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Thanks to the great work of Anxhelo, we now have a first test version of our new website! Before the changes are published to the official address, extensive testing and feedback is appreciated. We are also happy about pull requests :wink:

https://bytehamster.github.io/

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I’ll take a closer look later, but from first glance it looks very good on mobile.

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I’ll try and have a look at what we have coming Saturday, and see if I can expand on the content, particularly the About page as you mentioned @ByteHamster. Shall we say we try to launch Sunday nignt (CET)?

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Sounds good!

I just updated the “contribute” and “documentation” pages (currently building, not visible yet). The only page that’s still extremely empty is the “about” page.

How about cut a little bit of the description under the hero title?

(I also make the line-height to 1.4em, so it can take less space and still easy to read.)

Welcome to the forum, @bobchao, and thanks for chiming in. I think it is important to state that AntennaPod is made by volunteers. Not everyone knows the word “open-source”. What do others think about this? Should we prefer the short text by @bobchao or my slightly longer one?

The main page is just about a few highlights. We do not need to save space there.

Do you have an idea what we could write on the “About” page?

@tenkara_vt Could you (as a native speaker) please have a quick look at the spelling and wording of the main page and the “contribute” page? I think documentation and blog less important because they will probably change more often but those main pages give users the first impression.

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How about we replace “open source” with “volunteer-deiven” ?

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Volunteer-driven, subscribe to any feeds, respect your privacy while give you full-control.

This sounds rather cumbersome and awkward in English. Let’s try to think of something a little smoother.

Let me take a look and I’ll reply again.

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I think both ‘open source’ and ‘volunteers’ would be good to mention - they serve different audiences. I think the current length is good but the text could be improved a bit. And seperate from the length I like the proposal to decrease the lineheight slightly (at least on mobile) to make it easier to read.

Wow, I learn something new from the website under the Automation areas in Documentation. It looks and response very well on my phone.

I think in general it is ready, I would say it has a lot more content for engineers or technical people than regular end users to help them with the features. For example, Automation is the #1 item in Documentation, I have not seen anyone ask about that in forums.

I think the content will get better if we took the top 20 questions asked on the forum and github from people who did not know certain features existed, like skip silence, headphone disconnect settings, queue size, into a FAQ and into the Documentation section, it would look really good.

Items are currently sorted alphabetically. We could assign a weight to each item for sorting instead.

Most of the current documentation items are based on the old FAQ page. If you are interested in writing some more or improving the current ones, that would be nice :slight_smile: This is pretty easy to do for non-developers, too, so maybe we can even attract some more volunteers for that :slight_smile:

I don’t like FAQ pages. They are usually pretty hard to use and search. That’s why the new website only has a documentation section with integrated search function. We can add FAQs there.

Actually I would love to see a ‘features’ page that lists all these things. Something similar to the Latest Firefox features section on the Mozilla website or the All features page of Deskpro (bit random; know it from work). Basically a nicely presented set of cards on which you can click to expand the card or be directed to an entry in the Documentation page for more information. It could be based on and similar to the ‘contribute’ page.

I’ve just committed an expended About page. If there’s any comment I’d be happy to hear them.

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Yes to a feature page, where a contributor should add to when a feature is done.

We could add another attribute to important documentation items that shows them on the main page. Currently, it is organized more like folders but it doesn’t have to be that way. Alternatively, we could highlight more features on the main page.

I would see the features page as giving an overview, the documentation pages as going into detail. Another attribute could potentially be helpful later on. And it would definitively be great to list some more festures on the homepage, just like firefox did (maybe even by tagging features on the features page as ‘featured’ to make them show up :stuck_out_tongue: ). If the basic page/structure of such features page were done, I’d be happy to try and list/describe all features.

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Hi all,

The new website has been published! :tada:

Many, many thanks to Anxhelo for offering their support with this nice milestone!

Further feedback, comments are still welcome :laughing:

And I updated the first post in this thread to indicate what ideas are still on the table.