This thread is focusing on the current Krita.org site and how we might want to re-arrange the content and improve the overall design. These are areas we want to try and focus on.

- Layout ideas and wireframes
- Information architecture (where should pages be, what pages need to be created, renamed, or condensed)
- Features (website being responsive, better photo gallery, integrated twitter stream, etc)

If you aren't good at designing or explaining your design ideas, you can always give other example websites to help get the point across.

When thinking about improvements, keep some of these goals in mind

* communicate Krita as a professional, free, open source painting program
* communicate information better (news, about us, getting involved, artwork)
* re-organize the content to help usability
* adding an area for campaigns and donations
* re-think pages and see if we can improve them (store, faq, download, resources, press, community, developer info)
* a news page that shows that Krita is active

Everyone's ideas are welcome. The more input we can get, the better we an make the new Krita.org site!

Moved to the appropriate Krita subforum from the main Discussions & Opinions forum - to ensure it gets noticed.

bcooksley wrote:Moved to the appropriate Krita subforum from the main Discussions & Opinions forum - to ensure it gets noticed.

thanks. I wasn't even thinking about that.

I start by brainstorming the site's structure. We split everything in sections, each section has a landing page (from the main menu) and an own menu shared with every page in the section. The landing page will contain pertaining informations that don't need a separate page and/or an overview of the pages in the section.

• Features - The landing page showcases Krita's features with text and screenshots.
  Section menu:
  • Krita 2.X new features - Page about the latest release features.
  • Screenshots - Gallery showing Krita's screenshots.
  • Galley - Gallery of artworks made in Krita.
  • User Interviews - If we tag or categorize the site's news, we can have a filtered view showing only artists interviews
• Download - Landing page auto detects and shows the appropriate download links for your OS. Still you can manually select another OS or infos about source code download, unstable builds/repositories. Next to everything a donation banner.
  Section menu:
  • Requirements - System requirements to run Krita.
  • Krita Gemini - Page about Krita on Steam
  • Krita Studio - Page about Krita Studio
• Learn - Landing page: Link to the: Online Manual, overview of the other pages in the section. training DVDs banner.
  Section menu:
  • Get started - Quick introduction and/or link to the getting started guide (http://krita.org/Basic_Usage-v4.pdf). Other informations that could help other painting software users switch to Krita (e.g link to http://heap.kogmbh.net/downloads/Introd ... fromPs.pdf).
  • Tutorials - Links to good tutorials available on the web (e.g. youtube videos), and/or material made by or for Krita Foundation (there was a talk about about making series of tutorials for Krita.org not long ago). Maybe filtered view of "tutorial" news?
  • Resources - Another filtered view of "resources" news posts? I'm not sure to add this page.
• Get Involved - Landing page: Overview of the other pages in the section. E.g. Quick link to the Krita's official forums. Donation/sponsoring banner.
  Section menu:
  • Community - List of Krita communities around the web (I'm sure we have at least user groups in Deviantart and Steam, blogs, Krita artists sites, etc.
  • Development - Infos for potential developers (irc mailing list, compile guides, dev tools, etc.)
  • Documentation - Infos for potential online manual writers.
• Support Landing page: links to the official community help (i.e. this forum), commercial support at KO GmbH and the online manual. Overview of the other pages in the section.
  Section menu:
  • Report a Bug - How to report a bug and suggest new features.
  • Donations - Donation methods & development fund.
  • Merchandise - Things sold by the foundation (training DVD's, upcoming book, etc).
• About - Landing page: who we are, mission, etc.
  Section menu:
  • Foundation - Infos about the Krita Foundations
  • Press - Materials for the press
  • Other pages? - Like website content and Krita's logo licensing, credits and other legal stuff?

Feel free to quote and modify.

@Charblaze: I really like this! It is more concise than the version that I conjured up a little earlier. It is still keeps the content well organized too.

The only couple section that we could probably add to this list for completeness is the homepage and footer. This is my take on what that would include (mostly just moving a few things you already listed):

Homepage - Overview and News related

• News about releases, development progress
  
• Brief summary of what Krita is
  
• Gallery - slideshow Gallery of artwork made in Krita.
  
• Artist Spotlight ( previously called user Interviews)
  
• Area that can be used to promote fund raisers or other temporary campaigns
  
• get involved overview ( I think this is important to call out on the homepage for recruiting volunteers)

Global Footer

• social media icons
• Press link (goes to about page)
• admin login link

The gallery and user interviews didn't make a connection for me in the "features" section. User interviews are somewhat like news, so it would be nice to promote those on the homepage. I think the homepage needs to have a lot of artwork to emphasis that Krita is a painting application. That is why I think it would be a good fit to put on the homepage.

We also currently have a FAQ page. I wonder if we need that, or can roll that information into other existing pages?

Boud mentioned in an earlier post about the importance of press. I think we can still have the content in the about us section, but have an link in the footer. Clicking the link will go to the about page and jump to the press section. I would like to avoid duplicating any content on the site.

Of course these are all just my opinions.

My thought process is that we have fundamentally two kind of visitors:
* People new to Krita - the home page has to catch their interest pushing them into exploring the rest of the site and try Krita.
* Returning visitors - they are pretty much interested only in checking the home page for new releases and other news.
The "weird" connection of Features, gallery and user interviews is for the first ones. As Deevad pointed out users usually wants to check thing in certain order, "Features => new features => Screenshots => Gallery => User Interviews" seemed a natural navigation path to me (What it can do? => What's new things it can do? => How it looks? => What can I do/has been made with it? => Who/how/where it's used?). Makes more sense or am I the only weird one?

I agree on your Idea for the home page. The only difference is that the home page frames for gallery, news and artists spotlight are just a compact views, "widgets" or banners of a full fledged page. Your wire-frame proposal has a "See all" and "Gallery" links which can bring you to a page with an expanded view. Regardless of the actual section were those pages are placed, the home page can present everything at once and link it directly. We could even get away with just linking Krita's logo to the home page and avoid a Home section in the top menu. That's why I left out the home page and the footer in my previous post, they are less dependent on the actual pages tree and more flexible to changes, they kind be discussed "apart". For how I see it, a home page widget doesn't clash at all with a dedicated page.

By the way I was thinking of classifying the news with a tag/taxnomy/whatever the CMS of choice uses, and show them normally on the front page. The artist spotlight/User interviews can be just a filtered view showing only news tagged as such. Same thing for the tutorials/resources pages. Maybe it's not the prettiest solution, and the chosen CMS needs to have the facilities to do that, but it would make the life easier for the site maintainers.

IMHO, yes, we need a FAQ page for things like the GPL license, state that it is fine for commercial use (your *.kra file won't be subject to the GPL too), why we don't currently support OSX, clear any remaining confusion regarding the differences betweens Krita Desktop, Studio, Gemini, etc.

I agree, in the footer we can place any quick link we deem useful, especially PR, legal stuff, donations.

Does anyone have a web analytics account for Krita? It looks like the site uses Piwik. That might help in understanding the user flows for new and returning customers. The "transitions" feature looks especially helpful for that. http://piwik.org/docs/transitions/

Analytics will also be nice for other things like what web browsers do we need to test against when doing development.

Here lies a long post killed by some kind of timeout function. RIP

However no time to rewrite it now... instead i point you to a page showcasing the features of an application in a very persuading way.

http://pixologic.com/zbrush/features/ZBrush4R6/

I think the features page is the most important one. It can say much more than just listing features with some images. It can contain answers to faq, hints to "hidden" features, a first introduction of basic functionality. When i look for a new application i often click on the screenshots page.. But why? Because the features page just sucks.
So if this page is made with love there is not inevitably the need of a separate screenshots page. And i think the same applies more or less to other sections.

I have created a short presentation about the possible motivations of visitors.

Surely this is a subjective point of view (without page analytics data..). Page analytics might help to get a better understanding, but i would be cautious with this. Interpreting such data without the help of a professional analyst could easily lead to wrong conclusions, even with all the advanced tools provided by piwik or google.

I hope the paper helps during the next steps. Maybe some collaborative tools could help us to visualize ideas? I haven´t used google-documents often with that purpose, so i am not sure. If anyone has another idea or tool, that we can use (without selling our soul to web-marketeers), that would be great. I think that could fasten up the process and reduce everyone's amount of time spent on this project

GDrive Collaborative Docs

- User Motivations
- krita-wireframes - by: scottpetrovic

Btw for google drive are also a few wireframing templates available. Not as good as specialised tools, but therefor accessible for everyone (with a google account).

@vascobasque: Wow! You really put some time into this and thought about it. Hopefully we can help everyone find what they want. Doing these designs are hard, because everyone looks for different things. As long as the menus and page structure are easy to understand and read, that is usually a good path.

I agree with your earlier post about features and screenshots. I think they should be integrated together. Showing the features should show a lot of screenshots along the way.

I personally don't like putting content into areas that have no visual scent. If something is important, we need to call it out on a menu or somewhere on the homepage - not buried in another page that we hope people will stumble into (putting gallery in features). Sure, a lot of people will probably find it, but it isn't easy to find if that is what you are looking for.

Example scenario: if I tell an artist that I added some of their artwork to the site, they are going to go to Krita.org. Where do you think they will go from there? Are they interested in downloading Krita or looking for software updates?

Having the gallery on the homepage will emphasize that Krita is a great painting program and give a snapshot of the results you can accomplish with it. The gallery sells the program - that is why I feel it needs to be a big ticket item. If people see that you can produce great artwork with Krita, they will make assumptions that it has all of the features they will need. The features are the icing on the cake.

Along those same lines, if someone has a bug they want to report, what is the easiest path so they know where to go?

For the wireframes, I added the source file that I was using. this could give a good base to make changes and present ideas.

http://www.scottpetrovic.com/uploads/kr ... svg.tar.gz

I just used Inkscape to do everything, so that should be prett accessible to make updates to. I will probably make some updates and post based off our discussion so far.

I think for the most part, people are in agreement about where sections should go. We will need some more discussion on the artist interviews and gallery to figure out the best place for those to live.

I think concentrating on the wireframes might help with the decision-making process right now for further changes.

I made some updates to the design and added another version of the homepage.

http://www.scottpetrovic.com/uploads/kr ... mes-v2.pdf

I think the second homepage version is better than my original version for the following reasons

• There is only one place we have to worry about updating news stories. The other design kind of has two spots for news, so it might get confusing what news goes where.
• The artwork is a lot bigger taking up the main section, so we don't have to worry about thumbnails and lightboxes with the usual gallery set up.
• The purpose of why Krita exists is more clear with the tagline. Less confusion with other programs like GIMP or Photoshop.

For the artist interviews, it is like news since they are farily long. I think it needs to be close to where the news is at. Artist interviews are pretty much testimonials. It might be neat to do a pull quote or something similar if a neat thing is said in the interview.

For the gallery, I still think it needs to be on the homepage - if not on all pages to some degree. For the wireframes, I was thinking that the headers could have artwork in the backgrounds. Either one long image, or two or three images bunched up. We want to be consistent with whatever we do.

In terms of marketing and sales, this is the direction and philosphy I see it going.

Why are people really downloading Krita? Is it because of features? There are programs out there that have more features than Krita does (and maybe always will), so I don't think we want to expose that aspect too much. The strongest and most clear goal that Krita solves is being an open source digital painting program. Most people use Krita because they are interested in art. If we want a lot of people to use Krita, we need to target artists. What do the top illustration and concept art sites look like? (conceptart.org, conceptartworld.com, deviantart.com). They have images everywhere. I think artists generally seek out better artists for guidance and improvement.

Having a lot of great art everywhere on the site says that great artists use (and approve) this program. If all of the best artists stated how terrible Krita was, do you think a nice features page could possibly save it? You need features to make a program useful, but artists are really seeking advice and direction to become a better artist.

How can we help you become better artist?

This is the direction and energy I think that will resonate with artists.

"If we want a lot of people to use Krita, we need to target artists. " and "How can we help you become better artist?" made me go "yes" I really like the direction this is going and the direction you're giving the website project!

@scottpetrovic: You misunderstood, I want artist interviews and the gallery on the homepage! What I proposed is to have them both on the homepage and dedicated pages, as two views of the same thing. You can't show more than a handful of images and a couple of interviews on the homepage, so if someone wants more interviews, or artworks than the one already displayed on the home you need those pages.

Heavy wip, maybe with this it's clear what I mean: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwLdsM ... sp=sharing
SVG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwLdsM ... sp=sharing

Imho we can break down informations in more pages. Currently Krita.org has really long pages covering multiple topics, each topic should have it's own page. Another thing is that it's not clear at all what Krita Studio or Gemini are, the differences with Desktop version and were to get them.

@charblaze: some great ideas with those wireframes. It has the sub menus very similar to how Blender.org does. I know it is a WIP, but thought I would give some feedback just to kick off the conversation. I'll start from the top.

We probably don't need features, and then another section with Krita 2.x features. Maybe that was just two versions of the same thing. It might be a little confusing. Just saying features is good enough. I think people will assume the features are always for the newest version. I like your features like the "wrap around mode" and "psuedo infinite canvas". Those are the type of things we want on the features page.

I still don't think we need a screenshots section on the site. The features section is going to have 8-10 screenshots of the application talking about the different UI elements. I don't see what more screenshots will bring to the table.

For the download page, I like the blender.org direction. The jpegs are kind of low-res, so I can't see what they say exactly. The "Krita on Steam" reference is a little confusing in my opinion next to it. That is talking about the Krita Gemini product, right? There is a separete menu item for that, so we might not want it right next to the Studio product. If we really want to promote it more, we might want to put the Krita gemini product information below the dowload area and remove the Krita Gemini page.

Does Krita have that many software requirements to need a separate page? It might be better to put that in the download tab. It is important enough that people should know that information up front (no Windows XP support for example).

I see the Krita Desktop vs Krita studio reference. I am not clear what the difference is. I thought it was the same thing. That is going to confuse a lot of people.

For the artist interviews, I like the whole list being a sub-menu in the features section. We can still promote the most recent artist interview on the homepage, but have a link on the homepage to also "see all". I might take a shot at revising your wireframes in the next day or two.

Great ideas overall. This site is really going to be dramatically better when we are through with it!

"I see the Krita Desktop vs Krita studio reference. I am not clear what the difference is. I thought it was the same thing. That is going to confuse a lot of people. "

There are three differences:

* Krita Studio has commercial support on CentOS 6 and Windows.
* On Windows, Krita Studio includes OpenColorIO and OpenEXR.
* Krita Studio has a different icon