With the hopeful addition of Events as a top level item the main menu on the website will expand to 10 items, taking a lot of horizontal space. That will mean switching to the mobile menu on any window much smaller than full screen on your average 13" laptop. Window below starts wrapping the menu below about 1330px.
Unsure how much support there might be for dropping anything. Maybe Overview? It’s promoted lower down on the home page, and once visited probably isn’t a resource people need to keep coming back to. Maybe Learn More and Get Started could become two CTA buttons at the end of the existing Meet Django section.
Two section main nav
A two section main nav is a more significant change though frees up more room.
From an accessibility POV they could potentially still be in the same nav element, and only appear different visually using some css-fu.
Space efficient search form
Could reduce the search form visually to only a magnifying glass (like at the top of this forum). That’s a universal enough prompt. Making sure it’s still accessible the bulk of the form could become a popup.
More … overflow item
Only mentioning this for completeness. Wouldn’t consider it viable as it implicitly suggests some items are less important.
Thanks for bringing this up. We made it bigger yesterday by adding “Sponsor” to the menu, which has made fundraising harder than it needs to be. (Sidenote: If anyone wants to change the subject to why “donate” and “sponsor” please create a new topic and feel free to tag me in it to avoid this changing the subject.)
If I had to give one up, I think “Overview” would get my vote too. My concern with adding a second row is that we also plan to use the banner area more, which will push our page content down further. Visually, I think it looks good.
We just added Plausible to the website a few weeks ago, which should give us some data on how often these menu options are clicked. Once we have data to work with, it might help us figure out which menu links people are actually using or glossing over.
I do hear you there, and realise it will be a balancing act. Are there other ways we could address that concern? For example, changing the banner layout or making them dynamic in some way?
I think what you have is looking good. I agree that banner sizes can be adjusted.
Overall, I’m struggling with our menu options and what should really be at the top level. The relationship of Download + Code makes sense, and I’m not sure Issues should be at the top. Not that we want to bury it, but Trac seems to be used more internally than we want it to be for people to suggest something or get help.
I’m hoping Plausible can start to give us some data to work with, knowing how often people click certain links.
If we’re struggling to shuffle the available options, maybe the options could be revisited?
Overview | Download | Documentation | Get Help | Contribute
Relocate “Code” as a github icon over by the dark mode indicator. I know it’s service specific, though it’s practically universally understood these days.
“Get Help” is a new page with getting started, docs, forum, discord, 3rd party packages, topical articles.
“Contribute” is another new page to act as a jumping off point for anyone who wants to work on the framework - trac, contributing guide, translation opportunities, dev dashboard, DEPs, new feature proposals.
So those two options become less “here’s what there is” and more about “why might you be you here”, and then quickly informs what’s available on the two new pages.
This adopts all the bullet points raised by Sarah. The search bar goes to the extreme right to make the github and theme icons feel less isolated. When it gets focus it temporarily expands leftwards over the top of those two icons to provide for reasonable typing space.
If the aversion here is to splitting the options over two lines there is this approach gunicorn uses:
