Footer IA Revisions

Yeah, let's revisit the footer navigation.

The Get Started column could be replaced with

Community & Support > /community

with the following subnav:
Getting Involved > /getting-involved
Commercial Support > /marketplace
Groups & Meetups > http://groups.redesign.drupal.org/groups

Changing the title. I talked this over with some others and feel we should discuss the footer IA a bit more.

Current Redesign Footer links (same as: https://infrastructure.drupal.org/drupal.org-style-guide/prototype/homep...)

Proposed Redesign Footer links

* Drupal News
* Planet Drupal
* Association

* Community & Support > /community
* Getting Involved > /getting-involved
* Commercial Support > /marketplace
* Groups & Meetups > http://groups.redesign.drupal.org/groups

* Download & Extend
* Drupal Core
* Modules
* Themes
* Installation Profiles

* Events
* Drupalcon
* Training

* Advertise
* Security Announcements
* Jobs
* Druplicon

---------
thoughts?

Reading through issues it has been reported that the header seems over loaded and the footer has lots of room. Maybe the header could be could be reduced by adding the material to the footer?

Tagging for design review

Things I can tell you (because this footer was designed a *long* time ago) - it was certainly never intended that anything under a heading like 'Get Started' would take you to the Drupal core page. It would be good to maintain a Get Started link in the footer but it needs to go to the Get Started with Drupal page (infrastructure equivalent is https://infrastructure.drupal.org/drupal.org-style-guide/prototype/getst...)

If it was up to me I'd remove the 'Downloading Drupal' and 'Getting Involved' links under Getting Started (keeping a Getting Started with Drupal link in the footer but linking to the right place) and create a new Heading for Community & Support in that column and deep link into some important sections in that page. Which is much the same as is being suggested above.

Hope that helps

lisarex and leisareichelt's comments make sense to me, except I'd change the wording for the items in the "Download & Extend" heading. "Drupal Core" and "Modules" and "Installation Profiles" don't mean anything to people outside of the community. Something like this might be more accessible, and you'd put the Drupal community terms as tooltips (title attributes on the a elements):

Download & Extend

• Download Drupal [tooltip: "Drupal Core"]
• Add features [tooltip: "Modules"]
• Change styles [tooltip: "Themes"]
• Build sites faster [tooltip: "Installation Profiles"]

With a serious end-user focus, you could argue that installation profiles would be first on the list, rather than last, since good installation profiles drastically improve the speed at which you can set up a new site, but that's for elsewhere. ;)

Example attached.

"Drupal Core" and "Modules" and "Installation Profiles" don't mean anything to people outside of the community

While this is true, there's some value in getting new users up to speed quickly with Drupal terminology.

To this end, @vmiliano's suggestion is applicable but the title attribute could be reversed with the text -- title attributes are more descriptive/action-oriented than the hyperlinked text.

Possible example:

* Drupal core [tooltip: "Download the latest version of Drupal"]
* Modules [tooltip: "Add features and functionality"]
* Themes [tooltip: "Change design and styles"]
* Installation profiles [tooltip: "Download custom versions of Drupal"]

So, I'm new to Drupal and have spent little time previously going through the site, so I don't have much back knowledge about content categories, where things are, names, etc. While spending some time going through the site thinking about how the footer could be redone, I ran into a number of points of confusion. I think there are opportunities for further refinement down the road, but for something simple and doable by Monday perhaps, this is what I came up with:
The attachment has the headers and links with URLs, for reference.
In the footer, you have one style treatment for footer headers and a different style for link categories underneath. However, all items are linked. This is confusing because the same styles are used right before for the trademark line. Where grey is the color for the majority of links in the footer nav and black is the color for the headers, in the trademark line, grey is not linked at all and black is. Why use the same treatment when sometimes it indicates a link and sometimes it doesn't?
I came up with the following breakdown, where headers are not links, items underneath are.

News
Drupal News
Planet Drupal
Association News
Security Announcements

About
About Drupal
Association
Druplicon
Jobs
Marketplace
Advertise

Download Drupal
Download & Extend
Drupal Core
Modules
Themes
Installation Profiles

Learn Drupal
Get Started
Documentation Handbooks
Forums
Developer's Guide
Designer's Guide

Community
Community & Support
Getting Involved
Events & Meetups
Join a Group
DrupalCon

I'm fine with @c4rl's tooltip switch. I think @erinjo's outline has some issues overall, but makes some good points.

I'd follow lisarex's outline, but put "Security Announcements" under News per @erinjo's outline, and add in a link or two to documentation under "Community & Support." I'd also recommend tooltips for at least "Planet Drupal," "Drupal Association," "Drupalcon," and "Druplicon" in addition to the ones under "Download & Extend."

Drupal News
* Planet Drupal
* Drupal Association
* Security Announcements

Community & Support > /community
* Documentation > /handbook
* Getting Involved > /getting-involved
* Commercial Support > /marketplace
* Groups & Meetups > http://groups.redesign.drupal.org/groups

Download & Extend
* Drupal Core
* Modules
* Themes
* Installation Profiles

Events
* Drupalcon
* Training

* Advertise
* Jobs
* Druplicon

Based on @erinjo's comment #11, I've changed the link colors to better match the rest of the page. Some experimentation: I left the header links black and used the parent div's :hover pseudo-class to alter their color.

Thanks for fixing the theming, c4rl. I noticed the last item doesn't have the 'heading' style on the About. Can you fix that?

In terms of the IA, I appreciate all the input, everyone! I think what we have here is good enough for launch, and I'd like to do a solid round of usability testing with different audiences some point after launch.

Here's some additional changes:

* arianek and I decided it was high time to clean up paths to the docs pages, so that's been started e.g. documentation/build instead of a node number
* I'm linking Drupalcon to the Drupalcon site directly. The old link to the group site didn't work, and I don't see anywhere else to link that makes sense. We can always change this later if needed ... perhaps it needs to be more explicit e.g 'Drupalcon Chicago 2011'
* Under Get Started, I linked to the documentation sections that receive the most visits according to Google Analytics and arianek, a docs leader.
* Added API Reference

Heading style updated.

Following some discussion w/ jredding, I've added both Drupalcon links and changed api to read api.drupal.org.

The Drupalcon links spelled out look really ugly though :(

@lisarex Why not simply "Chicago 2011" and "London 2011?"

@drumm can you check why the links to the drupalcon sites are broken?

@c4rl, I think it's important we make it clear what the link is about, so I'd say keep 'DrupalCon' in

Committed a fix for this.