intothefuzz

The Mozilla community is an amazing thing, having proved many times over that it’s capable of doing anything from building a web browser to setting a world record. For those of us who work at Mozilla, a big portion of the job involves finding ways to engage the community as much as possible so we can harness its power (after all, that’s what enables us to compete successfully against the Goliaths of the internet business).

With that in mind, I’m particularly excited about today’s launch of the new Spread Firefox website. The old version of the site was created with the best of intentions, but it never really caught on the way we’d hoped…it lacked a clear call-to-action and never made getting involved as easy as we’d hoped. So, a redesign was in order.

The design of the new Spread Firefox is based around the theme of a community bulletin board, which is a nice metaphor, and it incorporates photos of actual community members in the header to give it an appropriately grassroots feel (be sure to hit refresh a few times to see the different options…you might recognize someone!). Even more importantly, it clearly lays out what’s going on in the world of Mozilla marketing and explains how you can help.

Big thanks to the Royal Order for designing the new site, and to Mary Colvig for organizing it all (not to mention the numerous others who worked tirelessly to make it happen). And extra big thanks to all the community marketing members who have devoted so much time and energy to helping push Firefox further along, even in the face of intense competition.

After many months of hard work by a variety of parties, the new Spread Firefox has finally arrived (in beta form…the full-on launch will follow before long). Although there’s still more to be done, we all feel like this is a big step forward for SFx and our open source marketing efforts.

The big change is that the new SFx is based around projects rather than blog posts, with the hope that this will inspire a lot of great ideas and collaboration among our worldwide community. Rhian has more details on how it all works.

Also, those of us in the Mozilla marketing department will soon be conducting the great majority of our business here…the goal being to be as open and transparent as possible. So, if you’re interested in what we’re working on – and even better, if you’re interested in helping out – stop by the new SFx regularly.

From a visual perspective, we tried to create an easily updatable, modular design that would support the projects concept as well as surface features like our events calendar, stats, user photos and more. The key challenge was structuring the site in a way that would expose as many different ways to get involved as possible. We worked primarily with Henry Brown, who did a nice job pulling all the disparate elements together without things getting too out of hand.

A mockup of the ‘non member’ state of the homepage is below (here’s the ‘returning member’ state)…both are slightly different from the live version, but we hope to get it all matched up soon. Lastly, if anyone knows how to get in touch with the two dudes featured at the top of the page, please let me know…we have some Firefox swag waiting for them!

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: