Coming Soon To Mozilla.com, Part 1
As our engineering and product teams move ever closer to the launch of Firefox 3, the marketing department is focusing on ways we can support the release. One of the biggest projects that we’ll be working on is a complete redesign of Mozilla.com.
Although the current site has served us very well in terms of driving lots of Firefox downloads, we still haven’t successfully used it to tell the story of what makes Mozilla so special. We want the new site to reflect Mozilla’s unique personality…that we’re a public benefit organization that relies on the active support of thousands of worldwide contributors to help keep the Internet open and free. Although readers of this blog surely know these details, this aspect of our brand hasn’t fully been communicated to the broad base of Firefox users.
It’s really a pretty amazing situation when you think about it: this unconventional arrangement has created a web browser that’s not only holding its own against the corporate giants, it’s used regularly by roughly 130 million people. How will we communicate all this? To be honest, I’m not sure yet but am looking forward to figuring it out together.
I should also make it clear that none of the branding stuff will get in the way of making the site extremely usable, accessible and localization-friendly…those are always top priorities. As a bit more background, here’s an excerpt from the project’s creative brief:
Unlike almost all other major tech companies, Mozilla is a people-powered, grassroots organization built by the contributions of community members around the world. The site design absolutely needs to embody our unique, unconventional and extremely un-corporate nature…while still being professional, informative and useful, of course.
The site design should be clean, but not boring; modern, but not tied to any short-term trend. It should be friendly and accessible enough to communicate the details of a high-tech product without feeling cold and technical. It should convey our passion for and faith in the power and potential of the web.
Lastly, it should have a sense of fun and playfulness – we’re serious about what we do but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
We kicked off this project with an agency a few days ago…I’m planning on sharing some of the early creative direction and mockups as we go for your review and feedback, so stay tuned for much more on this topic.
(Coming tomorrow: a look at some proposed interim changes to the Mozilla.com homepage)
November 20th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
[...] As noted yesterday, we’ve recently started planning a new look for Mozilla.com that will coincide with the release of Firefox 3. In the meantime, we’re still pushing forward with other, more incremental, improvements to the site. [...]
December 17th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
[...] been working on a Mozilla.com redesign to coincide with the Firefox 3 launch for a few weeks (check out my earlier post for a refresher on project goals and other details), and now have four early-stage design directions to consider. If you’re interested in this [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:36 pm
[...] and I are working on the Firefox-related content for the new Mozilla website, and would like to include a page that offers some tips & tricks for beginner, intermediate [...]
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
[...] been awhile since I blogged about the Mozilla.com site redesign, so it feels like time for an update on our recent progress. In order to provide some context, [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 11:50 am
[...] the coming weeks, but for now here’s a quick overview: * A completely new look & feel. I blogged about this a bit already, and will do so more soon, but for now I’ll just quote our objective from the original design [...]