CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The rationale behind having different navigation headers has to do with our "guesses" about who the audience is for the civicrm.org (main site) vs. the various "tools" and "resources" sites (wiki, jira, forums). Our thinking is that the main site is primarily used by folks who are new to CiviCRM and doing some initial exploration. Hence, the more general navigation options (Help, Participate...). Once someone is "in the weeds" - and they know that they need to check the documentation, or search the forums, or post a bug - then the "tools and resources" nav links seem most appropriate.

That said, we're open to the distinct possibility that our guesses are wrong - and/or that the "solution" is not optimal :-) If we did a consistent navigation for all civicrm.org sites - what navigation elements would you suggest including ?

Also would love to hear from other folks on this topic!!

I find the menus fairly confusing too - I use google to find my around the site a lot of the time instead. (the civiCRM site is much easier to work with than the Drupal site which I still can't make hide nor hair of!)

However, on the new user note, when I checked out civiCRM not that long ago as a prospective user civiCRM there were a couple of things I was looking for to help me decide if it would work for me:

1) FAQ  - something a bit more to the point and less wordy than a features list.
2) Forums - in particular the 'is civiCRM suitable for me?' type forum.
3) Installation Requirements (probably as part of an FAQ).

What I found was a lot of prominence given to the different modules which didn't mean a lot to me. Although technically the difference between civiEvent & civiMember is important when you are investigating it you just want to know that civiCRM can do all those things if you want it to.

The other thing I found tricky was a lot of text based links rather than menu based links. ie. if you want to get to the forum from the front page you have to choose 'participate' and then instead of finding a menu with the option you have to look through the text to find the link. (although google finds it just by 'civicrm forum')

While in beta mode I seemed to keep loosing the Beta sandbox (once again yay google) as I could never find the link.

I'm not so sure about the assumption that a new user wants different links than an existing user. Certainly I came at it used to using technical sites and found the menu on the forums page more intuitive than the front page one.