New Digs for Liferay.com

Liferay.com is getting a facelift.  Fresh theme, content, re-flowed flows - the whole 10 yards (why would anyone want to go only 9 yards, when it doesn't even get them a 1st down?).  And we're not just going to change the site once, but we really want to focus on giving ourselves a new platform for analytics, A/B testing, and the flexibilty to make incremental site refreshes and improvements over the long and short haul. It's gonna be good.

Given our open source roots and thriving community - the more innovative "ah-HA!" ideas we can get (including ideas from you!) the better!  And that's where we've started - by creating a sort of "new idea stew".

 

And quite the stew we have created.  We've had dozens and dozens of meetings with all sides of our company, gathering as many dreams and ideas as possible from our partners, events team, training team, support folk, international offices - all across the Liferay map.  Some feedback we heard came in resounding choruses ("Make the website less static!  More interactive!  And for goodness sake, more intuitive!"), and some ideas were new and ingenious, ("Turn the user dashboard into a one-stop shop for apps, license keys, news, suggested downloads, and everything that is hip and cool!").

 

So how does one gather so much feedback and make any sense of it?  We needed a way to "connect the dots", to give each idea a chance, while still letting the common themes simmer to the top.  Check it out - here's a draft of our affinity diagram (insert magic twinkly sounds and flowery hand motions).

Doesn't it look somewhat intimidating and professional??  Yeah... *long, dreamy sigh.. followed by being startled into sudden awareness*  So yeah, the idea is to find all of the common issues/ideas and plop them into groupings - groupings that settle into bigger groupings, that snowball into top priorities for us to answer in our coming months of concept brainstorms, wireframes, and development.  Hopefully something like this can help some of you if you're in the very same scenario for your company website.  More updates to come!

We are still young in this re-designing endeavor, but we'd love to hear your ideas and hopefully add a post-it idea in your name.  What do you want to see happen on liferay.com?

Love,

Webteam

Blogs
You're the first person to ask me. Hmm. Off the top of my head:

Public style guides, open to community feedback.
Appropriately cropped profile images.
High DPI graphics.
Simplified site maps and prettier urls.
Functional Twitter and Facebook integration.
Instant, drop down search results.
Drop down navigation.
Push state history.
More polls and better looking poll results.
Easily restructurable and multi-structural portlet layouts.
A minimum 14px / preferably 16px base font size.
Less link clutter and more open space on pages.
Responsive web design, including:
- a mobile-first approach, free of display:nones to the little guy.
- full support for flexible, "irregular" resolutions.
- resolution and device friendly videos, audio, carousels, tables, etc.
- beautiful, functional user configurations, blog and message board controls, etc.
A good Easter egg.
A website documentation team.

Those for starters.
Hi webteam,

here some unordered improvement ideas:
- search capability for groups (websites/communities)
- better search display
- localizable structure names (http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-15099)
- localizable friendlyURLs
- sharable calendars across groups
- sharable doc lib entries/ journal articles ...

Greets
Hi!

Here are my suggestions:

- improve search for forums (I always have to search with google to find what I'm looking for)
- documentation with creation date

Regards,
Flor.
Absolutely agree with the previous post.

- documentation (I know it's not the webteam's responsibility)
- mandatory creation date for all contents (to see at least how outdated the information is)
When I put Documentation at the end of my list, I was worried I was a minority. I'm very happy to see this. Thank you, Florencia, Ákos! I hope more people want this change. I hope we can get someone or some people specifically working on the documentation on our website.
Improving documentation would be awesome, and we're planning on it. Our top landing pages for users right now are:
1) Message boards
2) Homepage
3) Wikis
4) Docs

I was a little surprised to see that more people hit the message boards than our homepage - but it makes sense. People want to learn more, and people want to contribute!
It would certainly help in the user experience when I could always read the content in English or my selected display language. Sometimes when I do a search on Google and click on a link to the Liferay site, the site is displayed in a weird and unreadable language.

I think that a lot of people would click away when the see content that is not readable for them, and so clicking away.
@ Jon - awesome ideas, some of them are really web standards that our sites needs to catch up on
@ Oliver - more flexible localization is something that everyone would benefit from. I'm rooting for localized pages and layout settings!
@ Florencia & Akos - great idea on the creation dates. We'll see about adding that in.
@ Everyone - we need to make our search USEFUL!!

Keep the feedback coming
For documentation I would like it so the people could see the tickets as they are being worked on and when it was committed to trunk similar to what I've been doing manually for the Resources Importer wiki - http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Resources+Importer+Web#section-Resources+Importer+Web-Completed+Features
I also would like to have the possibility to see all the posts I've created or participated, no matter the date. I'd like to see the same information, but for any other user. Because the wall does not show all the information.