Redesign the support page

After seeing all the iterations of this page I must say I like the outcome, its more scanable and the information that needed to be prominently displayed as the business goal to improve ad incomest are. We might just fiddle a bit around with the format of the page when it comes to size of certain elements to get the biggest conversion.

Format
The alignment of the bullet point lists is off, it should be on the same indent as the content that you see under documentation, help, getting started.

Content
The content in Get started, Documentation and help need some work. For example we can't say, start here. We either have to inmedidly refer to the PDF or 1/2 other documents that are to get started. For the documentation, are we taking care of developers? (API documentation?). The Help content could possibly contain something, about WE LOVE to help, a indicator to aspire people to ask.

Nice writeup

For reference, here's a screenshot of the page as it currently stands, which will probably be nice for people coming back to this issue in the future to see how far we've come. :)

Here are my comments in graphical form: http://img.skitch.com/20080929-g5ws59wpcqjq2uyfubsccbx8kw.png

And in text form:
- I prefer the graphical ads. It makes it clear the distinction between community vs. commercial resources at a glance. It's also probably better CPM.
- I like the action/task-based heading "Getting started." "Documentation" and especially "Help" are weaker.
- No need for "Paid affiliate Advertising" header. People know what ads are. :P This will save some real-estate on the page so we could potentially add another link or two to the areas below.
- We should also include an inconspicuous link for "want to advertise here?" to help drive more business to this page.
- "Multichannel baby" doesn't fit with the rest of the text (Addi? ;)). It should ask a question like the other two.
- The bottom of the page says "Does this not meet your needs? Let us know." but there's no indication of how to let us know. :P Probably a link to the contact form, or..?

Thanks a lot for your hard work, folks. This looks great.

One other question. What is the "action" on this issue? Is this just a call for feedback? Is this a call for someone to implement this? Or..?

Agreed on all your points, esp. remove the 'Paid affiliate…" header and adding the contact link.
The copy needs finetuning for sure, I'm surprised to see my first draft largely intact still :-)

suggestions:
Documentation -> Read documentation
Help -> Get help
Multichannel… -> Want to join the discussion?

Put the 'want to advertise here?' link below the ads, aligned right.

Why do we need Google Analytics again? HBX is there, you could just use those?

I attached an image to show the alignment of the bullet points. I think that Training, books and commercial support should be aligned the same as Get started, get documentation ect.

We should work a bit on the copy :

What do you want to know more about? (Have to make this shorter)
Start here (Doesn't explain the link)

And on a last note : Can't find what you are looking for? Have a suggestion for improving this page, add a comment below.

Do people feel comfortable commenting on a landing page?

Do people feel comfortable commenting on a landing page?

When I initially checked out the new version, I thought this was a mistake until I read the copy of the page. Seems like people may want a way to leave a note that isn't out in the public for everyone who visits the page to see.

Broken link:

The link in the sentence "Support in other languages?" is resulting to a "Page Not Found".

Before the redesign, it was: See our list of Drupal community <a href="http://drupal.org/language-specific-communities">sites in other languages</a>.

To follow the style of the new support page, my suggestion is to change the text to: Drupal community <a href="/language-specific-communities">sites in other languages</a>?

So it will be:

Looking for translations? Drupal community sites in other languages? Can't find what you are looking for? Have a suggestion for improving this page ...

PS: The word "support" was actually dropped in this sentence even before the redesign because the sites listed on the linked page aren't *just* for support. Ref: http://drupal.org/node/5/revisions and http://drupal.org/language-specific-communities

John

I fixed the "other languages" link

The "Who do you think you are?" strikes me strange. think "Who do you think you are, the king?"

A couple of quick comments:
- the Google image ads are sometimes interrupting page load
- Under "Who do you think you are", I expected "Site maintainers guide" to be aimed at people who maintain Drupal sites, but it is instead aimed at maintainers of *this* site. Don't think the support page is the right place for this link!
But overall, much improved :)

chx: I think I have to agree, what could we do else?

qpk: Agreed, the site maintainers guide should not be there. Let me watch some statistics on this page, as we change it.

@Amazon Thanks to the great redesign. ;-)

Is this considered done yet? ;-) Just trying to clean up old issues. I'll mark this fixed and if someone disagrees, feel free to reopen.

I'm reopening this issue because the current design is no longer working.

• The three column layout looks terribly jumbled and incoherent
• There's only one ad in the middle so the links to More Training Resource and More Support Providers don't make sense. Also people with ad blockers won't see any ads, so the text needs to fit that view.
• It doesn't make sense to have a "Want to advertise here?" link in the middle of a page that supposed to be about providing support
• The documentation landing page has been substantially restructured since this page was done, so there's no need to provide 6 links to various parts of the documentation. One link to the docs page should suffice.
• The text talks about adding comments but comments aren't enabled

I'd like to clean up this page and remove text and links that are no longer useful. Something like the following (in one column) perhaps with ads at the bottom:

• Documentation and tutorials
• Drupal in other languages

Community resources:

• Forums
• IRC
• Local and working groups
• Mailing lists

Third party resources:

• Hosting and professional services
• Training services
• Books about Drupal

Thoughts?

(carrying these over from the previous issue and updating to reflect the content of 21).

I updated the text to say comment on this issue since that's the most logical place I could think of. Bojhan's point about public feedback is valid, but really, the contact form is overused and under-responded as it is.

FWIW, the design proposed in #21 does not appeal to me. I can see how some stronger visual separation between the columns would make them easier to digest. And I think that the images are an important part of the design that should always be there (even if we don't have an advertiser lined up for the slot at the current time). Moving the ads to the bottom will make them less valuable which will mean fewer advertisers, fewer $ for servers at OSL and things like the redesign, etc.

But I don't think the proposal in #21 is a real improvement over the past mockup/vision for the support page.

More separation between the columns would certainly help a lot as would making the left margins more consistent, but the page desperately lacks both a visual focus and some kind of vision for the information that belongs there.

It's billed as "support" but support has a very specific and universally understood meaning in technology: basically it's having somebody you can communicate with about your problem. Sometimes a support page will have one or two links to a FAQ or to the documentation (everyone wants to minimize support requests) but I've never seen such a jumble of information.

The page has six links to the documentation spread over two columns (in addition to a big "Documentation" tab at the top). I can see having one link to the documentation but why six or seven? Why those particular six? How do we know their question falls in those particular areas and not in one of the missing books? Why spread the documentation links between first two columns? Why is the third column called "Help" which is a term commonly associated with documentation when that's the column that doesn't actually contain any of the documentation links?

There are also two links to the forum (in addition to the Forum tab at the top) and there are a bunch of other links in no particular order. Finally it's tied together with bits of strangely chatty/cryptic text (e.g. "Who do you think you are")

It really does not look professional to me.

The Support page http://drupal.org/support seems to have been deprecated, though it's still published, unthemed, and quite ugly.

Should that page be unpublished, and this issue marked "fixed"?

I cleaned up the markup. I think it should be removed and redirected to either http://drupal.org/start or http://drupal.org/community.

I would vote for redirecting /support to /community and removing the current /support page.

That support page appears to be orphaned (I don't think it's linked to from the main nav anywhere and it's not in a book outline that I can tell). If someone is actually looking for support, /community is the page that will tell them how to find it. If they go to /start, they will just be sent to /community to find out about support anyway. That is also where the "community and support" links in the top and bottom nav take you.

That page got 1,800 visitors in the last month according to google analytics which puts it at the 1,212 most popular page on the site (out of hundreds of thousands, of course). It's got a lot of inbound links and is pretty popular for organic search traffic, so I think we should be sure whatever we send people to is comparable.

Let's see what Megan can do to get us more sponsors for that page. If it had a trainer and a book ad in there it would look a lot better and be more useful to people. I think the content is sufficiently different from /community or /start that it's worth keeping around.

I'll mail Jacob/Megan and see if they're able to work on this.

How is the purpose of /support different from /community (which is titled Community in Support in all the main d.o nav menus)?

To me they seem pretty similar, and it seems silly to have two pages that duplicate each others' purpose so much. Also, I don't think /support is linked to from any of the main nav pages (and it certainly is not in the main nav).

So if we are going to keep it, how about making it clear how "community and support" is different, or at least making a link to the Support page somewhere in the main nav or from the "community and support" page?

You're right that they are more similar than the /community url alias led me to believe.

Megan said she'll be able to work on this after Drupalcon. I'd like to wait until then before we take any actions.

I propose keeping the Support page and linking it from the footer. It can serve as a place to learn how to report spam, and get help. The Community & Support page doesn't support people needing help at all.

I'd even go as far as saying we should have a new Support tab on /community, with this page there too.

For advertising on this page, Megan has not included it in the web ads list, https://association.drupal.org/advertising/web. But it can always be added later. Since paying someone is a perfectly reasonable answer for many people to get support.

Would a round of editing on the "Community & Support" page, http://drupal.org/community, solve this without keeping the old support page?

I think the /support page should be repurposed into a Help (or Support?) page, linked from the footer, that will orient folks who are truly lost on drupal.org or want to report a spam or content problem. I would suggest it point people to the top level Communication/marketing books as well, as most of these are quite hard to find still

This page also could be a tab on /community section.

I filed an issue re: footer changes #1234422: Tweak to drupal.org footer .

We could close this issue though, and I can create another one to get the Help/Support page sorted out.

lisarex wrote:

I propose keeping the Support page (...) The Community & Support page doesn't support people needing help at all.

Yes, a possibility would be to have two header tabs for both Support (/support) and Community (/community), renaming "Community & Support" (/community) to just "Community".

A reason for this is the current situation of growing numbers of new users with support questions, flooding non-support workplaces in the community. This situation is discussed for example in #1236290: Decide on a course of action for improving support options on Drupal.org and #1236280: We need a central place for core contributors broadcast their business

A new related issue is #1242094: Restore "Support" in header navigation

OK, since we have things like books, documentation and community communication tools covered elsewhere, I propose two columns, with links to these landing pages:

Help with Drupal.org sites

* Report spam
* Report a problem with site content
* About Drupal.org
* Drupal.org projects (http://drupal.org/project/drupal.org%20projects?filters=bs_project_sandb...)

Help with Drupal software

* Documentation
* Forums
* Books
* Marketplace

Thoughts? What else seems useful to add ?

[EDITED]

Which page are we talking about in #37?

We currently have:
http://drupal.org/support (not reachable via the main header/footer nav as far as I can tell)
http://drupal.org/community (labeled as "community and support" in main header/footer nav).

I'm guessing that #37 is a proposed replacement for Support?

If so, ... let's see. It seems like if someone needs support, usually they need support with using/installing Drupal or themes/modules/etc... So how about:

left column
Get Help with Drupal software
* Documentation
* Forums
* Support IRC channel
* Books
* Locate professional support, training, and services (link goes to Marketplace)

right column
Get help with a Drupal.org website
* Learn more about Drupal.org
* Report spam
* Report a problem with site content
* Report a problem with site functionality (that would probably go to webmasters or infra?)
(I don't think that last link in #37 belongs - it would be way too confusing to novice users)

Thanks for the comments. Yes, I'm talking about revamping the support page in $37. Assigning to myself; I'll tweak this in my local env and will post a screenshot for review later today.

Attached is an updated version of the /support page. I kept some of the existing content. I'll move the HTML to the live /support page in a day or so.

The only concern is whether creating an issue is too high a barrier because they'll need to choose Component and Categories. Is there a way to pass preselected options via the URL?

Yes, you can do preselected options for component and categories. There's an example at the bottom of any api.drupal.org doc page. You can even put in a node body, which is helpful.

Sample link from api.drupal.org:
http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/drupal?title=Documentation%20pr...

So that has:
title=whatever
component=documentation
categories=bug
version=(must be a node ID or taxonomy term ID, not sure how to find that number)
body=whatever

And of course the URL node/add/project-issue/drupal gives the project.

I've updated the support page: http://drupal.org/support

I have kept some of the text elements from the previous one, and have added a link to report a security issue. The links the generate issues have pre-filled components. Any corrections or amendments?

Looks pretty good! Will that page be linked to from somewhere?

One question:
The "Drupal software has been translated" link takes me to localize.drupal.org.... But that is not very helpful as a support page -- that is more the page you would go to if you wanted to help translate Drupal into a language (although it does list the languages and their translation status). So maybe we could point people to a more helpful page? How about this:

Is English not your native language? [link to http://drupal.org/language-specific-communities] Localized communities and support are available[endlink], and you can also learn how to [link to http://drupal.org/localize] install Drupal in your language[/link].

Regarding the issue links on the right side:
a) Spam - I think the webmasters prefer the spam issues to be marked "task" rather than "bug report". How about:
http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/webmasters?title=Spam%20report&...

b) The others look OK to me. :)

Thanks Jennifer. I've made those changes. Yes, we'll link it, see http://drupal.org/node/1234422#comment-4861668 as well as the proposal to add it to navigation #1242094: Restore "Support" in header navigation

My suggestion was to link "install Drupal in your language" to http://drupal.org/localize actually. The page currently being linked to (http://localize.drupal.org/translate) is not as helpful, in my opinion -- it doesn't actually tell you how to install Drupal in your language... Thoughts?

I missed that one but yes, that makes sense. :) It's now done.

Looks good to me!

Excellent. Marking as fixed per jhodgdon's confirmation in IRC w/

I am new to Drupal and am not happy with it at all. I have been trying for several days to create a squeeze page and a content page where I can restrict view access. I found the squeeze page module but it will not download because windows cannot open it. I am still nowhere closer to finding out how to create a page with restricted access. There is no obvious entry to a help page and the answers to questions are explained but not answered. I am seriously thinking about moving to wordpress as I have already spent $300 developing my website and several days in downtime.

@ ctwilley, I'm sorry you're having trouble. I'm hoping you were able to get support elsewhere. I'm guessing you arrived on this issue via the link from the support page.

I'm afraid this issue is about changing the copy of the support page... anything to do with modules will need to be directed to the right channels in IRC, the forum, or module issue queue.