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New web design

dcuartiellesSeptember 26th, 2010

During Massimo’s keynote speech at Maker Faire New York, we have taken the opportunity of stopping our server for some minutes to implement the new layout to the server, but also to clean up some things. I am taking the chance to make a quick summary of everything we have been doing during the last two months:

Pushing the web up

improved layout: we counted with the Italian Studio ToDo to redesign our logo, they also gave a hand with the boards, the packaging, the web … you will notice our official color (blue) has got a touch of orange and that there is a consistent look and feel throughout wiki, blog and documentation. The forum is about to come, just give us some time

new ways of bringing content to the blog: just because we didn’t want to roll out all the changes at once, about two weeks ago we introduced the possibility of counting with contributors to the blog. Since we started we are registering an average of 3Gb more traffic on a daily basis. As soon as we have had a rest from the Maker Faire experience, we will be opening up for anyone to post their projects to the blog, under the supervision of a moderator

improved twitter integration: we have implemented the automatic posting to twitter, some of you might have also noticed that your twitter answers to @arduinoteam end up showing on our blog. It is our goal to integrate both platforms in a way that it will be possible for users to have conversations between both media

improved code layout on the documentation, but also on the playground: if you want to include code in the playground, we have included a wiki recipe called “sourceblock” that allows including both local and remote pieces of code. The code on the documentation site comes directly from the official svn repository in Google Code, in this way we have the security the examples on the website correspond to the same code that comes with your IDE. We are using the project Geshi to bring life to the code, if you are interested in the module we made, we have created a patch called arduino.php that color codes your programs with Arduino’s color schema. Take a look atΒ this example to see how it looks

cleaned away wikis that hadn’t been updated in a long time: The arduino.cc/it, arduino.cc/hu, and arduino.cc/kr sites are now linking to arduino.cc/en. If we can create a proper translation team in any of those languages, we will go back and take the job. So far it is possible to document in all those (and potentially any) languages directly on the playground which is actually much more accessed than any of those sites. On the other hand, arduino.cc/es and arduino.cc/fr are much more up to date and register a lot of traffic, we will keep on working with those sites just to make sure we can channel all those efforts to help as many people as possible. The above-mentioned wikis haven’t been erased, we have backups of them, in case anyone is interested

improved step by step documentation: this is probably the most exciting of the things we are presenting today besides the hardware. Tom, together with Christian Cerrito and Kate Hartman, have made a HUGE effort in documenting every example with a Fritzing drawing, a schematic and a piece of color coded source. This can be printed directly, your basic Arduino book can now literally be made straight from our website!!

You might think we are done with this, but we are just taking off. In the next couple of months we will improve the way you access our servers, unify passwords and usernames, link you with your favorite web 2.0 community, fix the forum (yeah!), and some more surprises you cannot even imagine yet.

Β 

Categories:Web'n'stuff

16 Responses to “New web design”

  1. David Beck Says:

    Hey Everyone Awesome website update just an fyi the favicon.png for the en website is not the new one like in the root its a simple change from favicon.png to ../favicon.png and it would replace the old one that we still see http://arduino.cc/favicon.png vs http://arduino.cc/en/favicon.png

  2. Philip Says:

    It’s great to see some of the new site come to life and hear about new stuff coming in the future.

    A couple of thoughts:

    * I’d prefer if the @arduinoteam Twitter account was kept purely for occasional posts directly from the team and a different account used for promoting blog (@arduinoblog?) posts/projects from other people.

    * On sections of the site like http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage and http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Libraries it would be good if the smaller logo/header used on http://arduino.cc/blog/ was used so more content is immediately visible on page load.

    Thanks for all the work that’s been put in. πŸ™‚

  3. dcuartielles Says:

    Hej,

    thanks for the comment, I was actually cleaning up things and this was a tricky one πŸ™‚

    /d

  4. dcuartielles Says:

    Hej,

    the Idea about the twitter account is actually quite good, I have been thinking also that a twitter account constantly posting kind of invalidates it as a twitter account. You suggestion sounds good, we will take it into account and discuss hopefully during our net meeting.

    Regarding the web design, I have to anticipate that this is not even the last iteration of our web. We are in the middle of something, and this is a step towards something bigger/better/brighter … again it is a pretty good point, I take notes for the next design iteration in the next months.

    /d

  5. @hjaltij Says:

    arduinoteam Love it!

  6. Ricky Says:

    Please change font to sans-serif type. Easy to read than serif font.

  7. Pyrou Says:

    a small bug on the menu bar in french section πŸ˜‰
    http://arduino.cc/fr/Main/Reference

  8. Pyrou Says:

    oh and by the way.. a css is missing for better code presentation http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/DirectDriveLEDMatrix

    probably something like

    .sourceblocktext { font-family:monospace; }

  9. dcuartielles Says:

    Hej,

    thanks for your comment, while migrating I noticed I forgot inserting the PmWiki tag that handles insertion of CSS. If you want to implement something like this in your own wiki, remember to have :

    as part of the head of your template, is what brings the Geshi highlighting of the code in place. From now on, when documenting code on the playground, people can use:

    (:source lang=arduino:)
    blablabala
    (:sourcend:)

    and the code will be highlighted as if it was inside the IDE

    /d

  10. dcuartielles Says:

    yeah .. I will fix the red color, the only thing that is bothering me is that the French words are too long, which makes the menu bar break, but we are waiting for some more French-speaking collaborators to help out since no one in the team speaks French, yet πŸ™‚

  11. Camille Moussette Says:

    Hi David,

    I’m French-speaking from Montreal (Canada) and can help for the translation if needed. I was supposed to work with Alexandra on the French documentation, but we never managed to have a finalized version. Maybe one day…

    Anyway, email if you think I can contribute for the French translation.

    /Camille
    camille.moussette@dh.umu.se

  12. gianni Says:

    I like the new web design, just want to say thanks for your great work !! Thank you !!

  13. Sara Says:

    Good the article.

  14. Ricky Says:

    Please change font to sans-serif type (eg. Tahoma, Arial, Verdana). Easier to read than serif font.

  15. Vicente Streib Says:

    Where can i find your rss? I cant find it

  16. New Arduino boards announced, and more Says:

    […] finally, the Arduino.cc website has undergone a massive update. New design for stronger branding, much improved documentation […]

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