Folks, As many of you know, these days I mostly contribute by optimizing our website, preparing different content including documentation/articles, and presenting the project at various events. One of the continuous website activities we undertake together with Mauricio and Ignacio is search engine optimization (SEO). It helps our website to be ranked higher by search engines for user searches falling in categories of in-memory caches, grids, databases, etc. (check this simple guide [1] if you'd like to learn the internals of SEO).
After checking the results of our recent user questionnaire [2] and confirming key capabilities with use cases Ignite is selected for, we decided to put more effort into the SEO. And, in addition to the keywords optimizations, we invested some time into the structural and UI changes of the website trying to make the experience better and, as a result, be ranked higher. So, today we'd like to share our first results and check your thoughts. In particular, pay attention to: - The new UI - instead of a dark and bloody theme, we decided to experiment with a more lightweight and contemporary design. - A new main page structure with the following blocks - banner, use cases, features, quicks links + tweeter feed. - Updated navigation menu - kept essential or highly-ranked pages. Do NOT pay attention to the following yet (we're ready to carry on with the items below once hear your feedback): - Text on the front page will be massaged and tweaked going forward to get better SEO. Presently, something might sound off to you. - Secondary pages are broken from the UI and structure standpoint - Some of the pages of the navigation menu, such as Videos, are not created yet. Alright, we deployed our branch to this test server. Go and check: http://157.245.190.104 (user: ignite, pass: apache2020) [1] https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo [2] http://apache-ignite-developers.2346864.n4.nabble.com/Ignite-Evolution-Direction-short-questionary-td44577.html - Denis
