I know this has been promised for a long time, but a bunch of us have been working really hard over the last several months to completely revamp Spread Firefox and it’s now almost finished. It’s currently in the final stages of development and should be ready for a public beta soon. In the meantime, here’s a quick excerpt from the homepage as a teaser:
Lots of changes are afoot for Mozilla.com. Nothing too revolutionary at this point, but there are several things we want to get cleaned up before a larger overhaul in conjunction with the Firefox 3 launch. Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll be working on:
* Homepage: The overall look & feel (silhouettes, blue gradients, etc) won’t be changing, but we will be making some content updates to make it feel more representative of Mozilla in general rather than just Firefox. Right now the homepage is very similar to getfirefox.com, so we’ll be adding some more information to give visitors a clearer picture of what we’re all about (beyond just Firefox, which will still be prominently featured).
* Top Nav Bar: As Mozilla.com has evolved over the years, certain inconsistencies and problem areas have developed within the site’s information architecture. To address this, we’ll be making some edits to the tabs in the top nav bar to optimize the site’s current configuration and to allow for easy future growth and expansion. Paul, Beltzner and I agreed on the following list of tabs a few weeks ago, although this still isn’t totally set in stone: Downloads/Community/Add-ons/Support/Store/About.
* About Section: Lots of outdated info in here, so we’ll be doing a general cleanup. We also plan on getting rid of the left navigation bar (which only appears in this part of the site) in favor of a pull-down menu from the About tab. Right now it’s looking like these menu options will be: About Mozilla/Careers/Press Center/Blog/Licensing/Open Source/Contact Us.
* Careers Page: This one is already complete…we launched the new careers page yesterday. The old version didn’t really convey what it’s actually like to work here, so we added a bunch of employee photos and quotes to provide some authentic Mozilla flavor. We also fit more content on the page using the scrolly DHTML style as seen on the new first run page. A screenshot is below, but you should really check out the live page if you’re curious.
Big thanks to all the Mozillians who let us use their pictures, quotes or photography for this page. And of course thanks to Alicia Patterson for the design and Steven Garrity for the sweet DHTML.
In my post about the Firefox Campus Edition launch from a few weeks ago, I mentioned that we would also have a poster available for anyone who’s interested. Well, the poster is now ready and we’ve printed up copies to be distributed to our campus reps. If you’re interested in printing your own, I’d be happy to share the high-res artwork…just email me at the address shown at the top of the sidebar.
Thanks to Nobox for their work on this poster (along with all the other Campus Edition stuff).
Three or four years ago my band played a show with the Dying Californian and I’ve a been fan ever since. A very, very casual fan, I should say, because I didn’t get around until buying their CD until this month. I’m glad I finally did, though, because it’s full of rambling, shambling, Neil Young-esque folky tunes (which is a style I have a soft spot for).
Here’s a track off their album ‘Coarsegold’…if you like the song you can buy the whole thing here.
The Dying Californian – “The Martyrdom of Perpetua”
P.S. When I ordered this CD (yes, very old-fashioned of me), there was a slight problem with the processing, and as an apology for my minor inconvenience, Jeff at Turn Records hooked me up with some free albums by other bands on his label. It was some good stuff, so I definitely recommend checking them out if you’re an indie rock fan.
A candid photo of Internet superstar Asa Dotzler eating chips, drinking coffee and spinning tall tales on the couch in my/David’s office.
I’m not really so into the idea of posting pictures of myself in this blog, but the t-shirt shipment came addressed to me and I was the first person to wear one, so…
Anyway, here’s the latest Mozilla shirt, this time for Rock Your Firefox. I really like the way it turned out. Lee Tom did a great job putting a new twist on his original Rock Your Firefox art…I’ll definitely be wearing this one a lot.
Update 9/18/07: Added a new photo featuring me and Paul. We didn’t plan this, I promise.
Like the old commercial says, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. With that in mind, David Rolnitzky and I have been working to improve the Firefox first run page with the aim of increasing the post-download user retention rate.
The previous version of the page was light on concrete ‘getting started’ information, so in the new page (which went live a few days ago) we wanted to provide a few quick tips on how to use some popular Firefox features. Our assumption was that if we can educate people on these features early on in their Firefox experience, they’ll be more likely to come back next time.
The big challenge was to provide this info in an easily scannable and non-invasive way so as not to delay people from actually using their new browser. To do this, we’re exposing just one tip at a time – the rest are discoverable through a series of pretty nifty DHTML transitions. We also focused on only four very easily understandable features and tried to keep the copy as short as possible.
This is obviously a crucial page in the Firefox new user experience, so we’re considering this the first in a series of tests. Right now it’s only available in the en-US version, but once we have a better idea of what works we’ll begin the process of localizing it for Firefox users around the world.
A screenshot of one of the panels is below, but I highly recommend viewing the actual live version of the page to get the full effect.
Thanks to Paul Kim, Mike Beltzner, Chris Beard and Jay Patel for their feedback and advice on this page. Big thanks to Alicia Patterson for her design work and Steven Garrity for his DHTML wizardry.
Obviously I’m not very good about living up to the “of the week” aspect of this whole MP3 posting thing, but in honor of Wilco’s recent performance in Berkeley, here’s one of my favorite alternate Wilco tracks. The “real” version can be found on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which you should definitely buy if you don’t have it already.
