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  • Paul Kim 4:07 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink  

    Proposed Changes to Mozilla Web Sites 

    Following on from the Foundation/Corporation split and in preparation for the Firefox 1.5 release, we’d like to significantly reorganize our web content over the next few weeks. The big picture is that we want to move to separate sites for the end user (mozilla.com), Foundation (mozillafoundation.org) and developer (mozilla.org) audiences.

    Much of this plan is a continuation of what we’ve been doing to better organize our web site presence and to focus our content for specific users.

    Addons, SpreadFirefox, and Devmo are good examples of where we’ve made progress in the last year in better targeting our various audiences. mozilla.com and mozillafoundation.org are next in line.

    What follows is the current plan; comments are welcomed.

    mozilla.com
    With the launch of Firefox 1.5, Firefox and Thunderbird product content currently on mozilla.org will migrate to mozilla.com. We’ll also be doing a minor refresh of the site’s look and feel. mozilla.com will become the primary end user site for Firefox, Thunderbird and the Mozilla Corporation.

    mozillafoundation.org
    Information about the Mozilla Foundation will move to mozillafoundation.org. This will be where members of the community can get involved with and keep up to date with what the Foundation is doing, as well as learn about the Foundation’s history, mission and people.

    developer.mozilla.org
    The Mozilla Developer Center will continue to ramp up as the primary destination for developers who are building for and on top of the Firefox platform to find reference content, code and other resources.

    mozilla.org
    While we establish the new sites, mozilla.org will continue to act as a landing page and will help redirect people to the most appropriate sites for specific audiences. After we launch Firefox 1.5, mozilla.org will continue to be home to tools and resources for the various projects making up the overall Mozilla project.

    spreadfirefox.com
    spreadfirefox.com will continue as the hub for our community marketing efforts supporting Firefox. The site will be overhauled with a look and feel refresh as well as new project tools.

    addons.mozilla.org
    The Mozilla Add-Ons site will continue to be a primarily end user facing site for people looking to extend their Mozilla software with extensions, plugins and themes. It will also continue to feature tools for developers to submit their add-ons to the site.

     

    • Cameron 6:42 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink

      End users may still remain confused about mozilla.COM vs addons.mozilla.ORG …

    • Rishi 7:57 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink

      So the MoCo has the resources to do organizing that the end user may not, in fact, actually ever notice but not to make AMO/UMO, a very high visibility Mozilla website, stop sucking? Or even at least admit that it sucks?

    • pd 9:29 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink

      Please ensure all those links to http://mozilla.org/products/firefox/ are appropriately redirected.

    • David Naylor 1:58 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      Sounds good to me!

    • David Illsley 2:02 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      I second Camerons point about mozilla.com vs addons.mozilla.org

      IMHO the end user bit of addons should be at mozilla.com (as end users are more easilly confused etc etc… and those people who do actually think about security like we all want them to do might not trust it… and I don’t want end users of addons to have to understand the corp/foundation split)

    • Eric BE 3:10 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      I think the above reorganisation is pretty USELESS (at least partially). What would be much clever to do, would be to include the international website is a common hierarchy.

      I just want to illustrate my point by an example : in the extension manager, when I click to the link to look for a new extension, it redirect me to the English site addons.mozilla.org. Unfortunately, my version is a french version. To find a site with french version of extensions : i need to go to the site http://www.geckozone.org/ which is referred nowhere in the mozilla site. When I observe the french version installed in my friend computers they NEVER include ANY extension. Why ?

      The reorganisation, you propose here should include the international dimension of mozilla.

      Don’t forget, that the existence of
      - http://www.geckozone.org/
      - http://www.mozilla-europe.org/
      - …
      is mainly required by the POOR international support of the mozilla.org website.

    • Ben Basson 7:08 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      I’d like to third the points raised about addons.mozilla.org – addons.mozilla.com would better fit, considering the end-user focus of mozilla.com

      A possible problem with this idea however is the whitelist feature within Firefox.

      Either way, if MoCo is splashing out on a website reorganisation, it’d be nice if they pumped more resources into AMO, which currently needs a lot of work, compared to the other single-focus sites which do their respective jobs much better.

    • beltzner 8:53 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      I believe that we’ll be doing a cname redirect so that addons.mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org point to the same place, but it’s a very valid point and exposes an interesting overlap: products are obviously the responsibility of the corporation, but where do extensions, plugins and themes fit in?

    • Andrew Jackson 9:48 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      All throbber urls and debug menu urls may have to be changed in the codebase. E.g. firefox’s throbber url needs changing to mozilla.com, it’s start pages, mozilla related bookmarks, etc.

    • Greg 11:03 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      While it may not be specifically on-topic:

      The visual redesign of many Mozilla sites (devmo, AMO, wiki) inclues a yellow bar on the top. This looks too similar to the yellow info bar that Firefox pops up for blocked popups, missing plugins, etc. Every time I visit one of these sites, I think “whoa, what’s the error here… oh wait, nevermind.”

      That visual design should be changed. Just a slightly different coloring of that yellow bar would be enough.

    • Paul Kim 9:35 pm on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      Thanks for the comments everyone.

      We’re planning on improvements to AMO that we’ll share soon.

      Eric BE: We’ve been working closely with our international affiliates (Mozilla Europe, Mozilla China, and Mozilla Japan) to extend and improve our international reach. Easier navigation between locales is a long-term goal and we will continue to work on that going forward.

    • Herbert Eppel 4:43 am on December 2, 2005 Permalink

      In my view, the shift towards mozilla.com is very unfortunate, because I feel it undermines Mozilla’s image/reputation as being exactly the opposite of what .com represents! Please reconsider!

    • Scott Thorne 7:03 am on December 8, 2005 Permalink

      This is all very good info, but it was too hard to find. When I was confused to find mozilla.com pages coming up, I started looking around for an explanation and couldn’t find one on a mozilla.anything page. Goggle helped me find this very good page. mozilla.whatever needs to put better explanations about all this chaos on their sites.

  • Paul Kim 4:37 pm on October 28, 2005 Permalink  

    beginnings 

    numen (n(y)oo’-men) n. a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon or locality (pl. numina)

    So this is the part of the blog where I tell you who I am.

    I’m the father of a de-lovely two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the husband of a gifted artist. I live in Oakland, California, home to (in no particular order) Jack London, Angela Davis, Children’s Fairyland, Ishmael Reed, Lake Merritt, MC Hammer and Del tha Funkee Homosapien.

    I’m the new director of product marketing for Mozilla Corporation, and I am damned happy to be here.

    It’s a dream job for me, and it’s going to be an adventure spreading the word about who Mozilla is and why what we do matters.

    I’ve worked in technology for most of my career. My first job after college was as an interactive scriptwriter and associate product manager at Spectrum HoloByte, where we made computer games based on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

    I left Spectrum after several years to work for the Milarepa Fund. Milarepa was hosting the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. I remember the guys from Sonicnet set up a live webcast from the shows, although how they managed to pull that off in 1996, in the middle of the park, still boggles me. It was a beautiful two days in every sense. Greets to the M. crew if you are reading this now in 2005.

    After helping to start up a television advertising company, I worked for two years as an independent web producer. Then it was off to business school, and product marketing at Adobe Systems, where I launched PageMaker, InDesign CS PageMaker Edition and Creative Suite 2.

    Which brings us to today.

    My intent is to use this blog to promote Mozilla’s mission, and to demystify how we make our marketing decisions. I read a number of marketing blogs, and I’m struck by how much is presumed about the level of inside knowledge a reader already has about the practice of marketing. I’ll try as much as I’m able to share what I’ve learned over the past several years of school and work when I post about things we’re doing.

    I’m glad to be here as part of the Mozilla community.

     

    • seamus 5:02 pm on October 28, 2005 Permalink

      FIRST!

      Welcome to the blogging world, Paul. Consider yourself linked.

    • Paul Kim 5:53 pm on October 28, 2005 Permalink

      Wow that was fast, Seamus. Thanks for the welcome & here we go…

    • beltzner 7:50 pm on October 28, 2005 Permalink

      Heh, I think I’ve used a good number of the products you’ve worked on in your previous lives. It’s great to have you aboard, Paul, and I’m looking forward to working with you.

      In case nobody’s mentioned it yet, get used to searching out the Starbucks Doubleshots that are in the downstairs fridge. We don’t tend to sleep a lot of the time .. :)

    • jordan 8:38 pm on October 28, 2005 Permalink

      Congratulations on the position, and may your career be a happy one.

    • jon 10:34 pm on October 28, 2005 Permalink

      congrats, pk. looking forward to seeing the fruit of your labor…and to see you, now that you’re in lovely MtVw

    • Channy 9:52 am on October 29, 2005 Permalink

      Welcome Paul,
      This is Channy Yun, the mozilla korean community. I hope you help product marketing of mozilla.

    • Tristan 10:45 am on October 29, 2005 Permalink

      Welcome to the wonderful world of Mozilla blogguers, Paul!

      It’s great to have you share the marketing vision of Mozilla corp.

      Marketing is not always understood by the Open-Source crowd, and communicating is a must. I’m adding you to my aggregator right now!

    • Paul Kim 11:05 am on October 29, 2005 Permalink

      Thanks everyone for the warm welcomes. Also I’m still tweaking my WordPress settings so bear with me if it takes a little while for your comment to appear here. I will probably remove comment moderation next week and see how much (if any) comment spam shows up. When I make that change there should no longer be a delay for your comments to appear.

    • Luis 12:35 pm on October 29, 2005 Permalink

      Contraz on the new pos.
      I wish you the best on Mozilla..
      U are now part of my Bookmarks.
      :D

    • Ivan Icin 12:46 am on October 30, 2005 Permalink

      Good luck!

    • Kris Silver 9:06 am on October 31, 2005 Permalink

      Good to have you promoting Firefox and more Paul, congrats. I’m part of the 11 or so people on the team with Ian Hayward, working on a new, better, more effective SFx! Look forward to working with you on related things in the future hopefully.

    • Michael G. 5:14 pm on October 31, 2005 Permalink

      Hi! Glad to have you on the Moz team!

      Since you are the new director of product marketing, I might have to talk to you soon; but only after the launch of 1.5… I’ll wait until you are less busy.

    • Marco Casteleijn 3:31 am on November 1, 2005 Permalink

      Welcome and good luck. Like Kris Silver I am part of that team on SFX (with Ian) also, and marketing is of interest for me.

      I am also looking forward on future co-operations! BTW I just named you our marketing guru ;o)

      Kind regards,

      Marco

    • KenSaunders 6:24 pm on November 4, 2005 Permalink

      Welcome Paul!
      I volunteer and contribute wherever and whenever I can to Mozilla. I’ve recently created the Firefox Accessibility Project and I’m a contributing member of SFx and other projects. The greatest thing I’ve learned about Mozilla is how open and welcoming all of the Mozilla communities are. I’m new with limited technical knowledge, but I’ve been welcomed by everyone that I’ve been in contact with, but I’m sure that you already know this. Congratulations on the position.

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