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CiviCRM Website
CiviCRM Website

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Last edited by josh
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CiviCRM will begin a transition off of D7 in the coming months and is evaluating this effort to also coincide with a major site revision.

The CiviCRM community recognizes that ecosystem growth is key to its sustainability and to the overall health of the project. The CiviCRM website is the project's single largest asset with respect to overall growth, so this 'transition' needs to account for both the technical aspects as well as the non-technical.

Functional Objectives

The following are identified as primary objectives of the ideal website for CiviCRM (a discussion about more granular objectives may be found here):

  • The site should be multi-lingual. Many non-English speaking countries represent growth markets for CiviCRM. In its current form, CiviCRM is very competitive in its internationalization. Many non-English speaking countries have favorable views of open source.
  • The site should clearly explain what CiviCRM is and how it can be used. It should provide easy access to decision makers that come to the site to learn about what CiviCRM is and what it can do.
  • The site should clearly funnel more community focused users and developers to resources they need to become more productive faster, and to get and stay engaged with less effort. The site must make it dead simple to get involved with CiviCRM.
  • The site should be exceptionally easy to manage, maintain and adjust. CiviCRM is often slow to respond to market opportunities and should, in conjunction with its social media efforts, become more responsive.
  • The site should use as little custom code as possible. When code is necessary, we should endeavor to create generic extensions.
  • The site should seek to more clearly position CiviCRM Spark as a viable option for onboarding new users and CiviCRM ESR as a viable option for slower adopters.
  • This effort should endeavor to use as much volunteer support as possible.

This intiative can be broken down into 3 distinct areas of work (below) with examples of how other projects achieve these found here:

1. Technology & infrastructure

Which CMS, what extensions, what additional custom code is necessary, costs to transition, costs for ongoing maintentance, etc.

2. Content production and site structure

Identify, revise, draft proper content and organize it in a way that is consistent with the site's audience and objectives.

3. Branding and design

Identify and communicate our key messages (unique selling points), our overall "brand" and what CiviCRM stands for, and leverage design to reinforce these.

  • We are unclear in our value proposition to our market, resulting in either inconsistent or no messaging at all. What are our central themes?
  • We have no clear style related to our presentation and our communications. We simply "exist". Are we young and scrapy? Are we the underdog? How much to we point out our differences with our competitors? We have a compelling story. How are we telling it?
  • We need a style (fonts, colors, designs, etc.) that reinforces our brand and that facilitates ease of use for users.

Project Plan

Milestones include (need to develop issues):

  • 15 August: Technology decision - Which CMS and what implications does that have on infra and on site funcationality?
  • 1 September: Dev site staged
  • 15 September: Site structure finalized
  • 5 October: Content finalized (english)
  • 10 October: Content translated
  • 10 October: Brand revisions and style guide accepted
  • 31 October: Design complete and implemented
  • 1 November: Site live