Through Google Season of Docs, we’ve been lucky enough to have @marslan8530’s help organizing our Wiki. Turning our attention to the website, our goal is to have a new, branded website that tells our amazing story and clearly relays our mission with a more appropriate information pathway for our target audiences.
In September, we reached out to external website designers and developers. We’ve reviewed various proposals and had multiple discussions during Operations meetings and the #website-rebuild Slack channel about what it will take to re-vitalize the OpenMRS website. This has led to greater insight into what it will take to achieve our goal and it’s clear that it will mean going beyond the technical work of re-building our website. It’s also about creating visual and written content that speaks to a variety of target audiences.
Anyone interested in working with external website designers/developers over the next couple of months and driving this work forward is welcome to join our new Website Squad. Please follow this thread, join the #website-rebuild Slack channel, and fill in the Doodle poll below so that we can set up an initial, weekly meeting and discuss scope, roles, engaging external website specialists, and how we’ll work together.
@dkayiwa If we are doing it by the native code (e.g: PHP, React, or whatever), and If we have it in one of our repositories - then it would be qualified as a GSoC project (Required some amount of the work for 03 months also).
But I’m not actually aware of the context in the above , Are we fully changing the website or are we just going to do something with WordPress?
We aim to do this work this quarter, so the timing won’t work out to have this as a GSoC project.
Since one of our key insights around re-branding is that we need to work out our IA and content ready first, we really need to focus on that in the next couple of weeks. And since the website is community maintained, we’ll likely stick with Wordpress or similar CMS.
As a result of our outreach last fall, we have a good list of website designers/developers going. We’ll need to go back to the project description, flesh it out to include some of the re-branding work, and then figure out who can do what.
Quick update: I’ve had input on a weekly meeting time from several people and it looks like the best time will be Mondays at 7:30pm IST | 5pm Nairobi | 4pm Cape Town | 2pm UTC | 9am Boston | 6am Seattle. Anyone is welcome to join!
Please send me any suggested agenda items by Friday morning - and I’ll aim to post a reminder on Friday afternoon.
@herbert24
In last minute of call, @jennifer said while going through doc, make sure to write your name according to page you’re working on so we don’t end up working on same page twice.
Thanks and happy working
Here are the key points, questions, and action items for this week.
Timelines
Aim to have new content + website up by the end of March.
Will need to set timelines for milestones, like new IA and content (February)
Work up to January highlighted the need for us to work on our IA and content before engaging any external website designers or developers to work alongside us.
Target Audiences
We reviewed the four target audiences and their objectives
@marslan8530 proposed describing the user personas for these four audiences
Mapping current website
@zuzanna suggested making a presentation so target audiences can navigate the website
hey guys join me here in figma where we can collaborate our work
but do not delete anything also figma allows to keep suggestion by click the comment icon
first lets confirm the design and then integrate it with html and css
i think that would be good
Welcome, @ajeymuthiah! The work that we’re doing on the IA will definitely inform our design, so I hope you’ll join us as we both map our current IA and then propose a new one.
Looks like some good progress has been made on the user personas for our target audiences - awesome! It would be great to have others on the squad review, add, comment, etc.
@herbert24, if you want to jump into the mapping, go for it! I’ve listed the categories, so simply put your name next to whichever one you want to review + map. If you have quick questions, our Slack channel could be a good place to ask them.
I have a rough draft of IA and by rough i mean really rough
Go through it, drop comments/edits as per your knowledge and understanding so we can make IA more friendly and interactive for users.
@jennifer You may also add a comment regarding example of plone we talked about. Would it be a good idea to have a separate domain for developers/contributors or another idea if you have.
@marslan8530 I’m sorry but this new architecture isn’t logically ordered for me. I put my suggestions in the doc. And I know that I’ll do the same task twice but I want to show you how I see this and what I would like to put there. New information architecture isn’t correct with what I learned and how new modern pages looks like. Later I put here my vision of the web.
I think you did the best and still appreciate your work
@marslan8530 and @zuzanna, I dove into your proposals and peppered them with comments.
I looked at the two side by side and saw a few places where things more or less aligned. I pulled from them both and added some new things (like conference!), so now we have a third IA to consider. It’s on p. 4 of the Website IA New document.
Last week, we used the new IA to start drafting new content. We took some of the old content that was still relevant, in some cases updated it, and in some cases, made some heavy revisions. We talked about having short, key messages front and center, with links to other pages where more in-depth content could be found.
On Monday, we ended up talking a lot about the Get Involved section and what content we put under “Implement.” We’re still working through this part of it and we’ll see where we are on our next call.
Anyone is welcome to join us - feel free to ask questions and share ideas here, or go into the draft content and chime in.
, Are we fully changing the website or are we just going to do something with WordPress?
