#21942: Sitemapping the current site layout -----------------------------------------+-------------------- Reporter: linda | Owner: hiro Type: defect | Status: new Priority: Medium | Milestone: Component: User Experience/Website | Version: Severity: Normal | Keywords: Actual Points: | Parent ID: #21222 Points: | Reviewer: Sponsor: | -----------------------------------------+-------------------- = Objective = * generate a digraph representation of the current sitemap of www.torproject.org.
We are doing this to visualize how the website is currently laid out, analyze the pros and cons of the layout, and to see user paths throughout the website. = Definitions = * a ''sitemap'' is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. It can be a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design. * a ''directed graph (or digraph)'' is a graph with a set of vertices connected by edges, where the edges have a direction associated with them. = Methodology = To generate the sitemap digraph, one person (linda) manually visited the website and manually wrote the code for generating the visualization. The manual crawl began by visiting all the pages reachable with one click from the front page, then visiting all the pages reachable with two clicks from the front page, and so on. This continued until there were no additional pages to visit. External pages (any site that wasn't www.torproject.org/stuff, so donations.torproject.org would be considered an external link) and duplicate paths (if one page was reachable from the header, and also from the footer, for instance) were noted along the way. There was existing work done to sitemap the website (#10591), and this was taken into consideration. The previous work was used to check that there were not any sites that were not accounted for, but since the digraphs were not generated in the same way (the old method did add nodes for external links, whereas this digraph does, for instance), they do not look identical. = Results = * a digraph sitemap of www.torproject.org * observations about site structure along the way: - 38 links on the front page, which leads to 30+ pages--that's a bit too much. - 3-4 ways to get to one page (header, footer, inline, from a subpage), sometimes with different text ('volunteer' and 'get involved' lead to the same page). - there are site headers, subheaders, AND side headers, which compete for attention. - the header, subheader, and footer stay the same throughout the site, and are visible everywhere. - the side headers sometimes appear, and also are different depending on which page you are on (https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en vs https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en). * ideas about structure for the new www.torproject.org - keep it simple: nothing more than sub-sub-sub pages (3 clicks away) - less is more: reduce the different amount of content on each page, and expand on the select few topics that remain on each page. - consistency: use the same phrasing to refer to the same pages and topics throughout. - minimize: use only a header and footer. - put things in the footer that are not as important, and link to a leaf page. The current footer links to pages linked to by the header, which is kind of confusing. - organize by target audience: a lot of the existing content can be organized into the developer, support, and outreach portals. (for instance, the manuals, project pages, wiki, can all be in the developer portal.) -- Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21942> Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/> The Tor Project: anonymity online _______________________________________________ tor-bugs mailing list tor-bugs@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs