March 1, 2019 10:12 pm

New dash.org site is live

We are happy to announce that the new dash.org is live!!

We hope everyone can enjoy the new site.

The main things we aim to achieve with this update are:

1- Define a new information structure that is consistent with what we know of our audience already. On the old site, everything was mixed and finding what you were looking for was difficult. Now, we have defined four different groups of users, and we show each of them the things that make more sense. These are individuals, businesses, developers and community. In the future, it would probably make sense to even have separate sites for some of those groups, like developers or even merchants. However, we don’t have enough information yet to make that kind of decision. Nor we have the resources at this time.

2- Fully implement the new branding approved in mid-2018 and get a more current design. Since Dash is a user-centric project that praises itself of being human, easy and approachable, we decided to include lifestyle images on top of some of the pages. This may be a controversial decision, but we believe it is the right one. Companies like Paypal have been doing this for a long time because people empathize with people and it works. We’ve combined that with some custom illustrations that make navigation more pleasant and fun.

3- Get a flexible site that we can keep updated easily. Our old site went stale because it was very difficult to do the smallest change and we didn’t have resources for that. Our new setup is very easy to update, while we keep a solid and secure system. This will allow us to use the website as the tool it is supposed to be. From now on, it is part of our day to day work, so instead of big updates from time to time, you can expect a constant flow of smaller ones. Related to this, we are now able to act on the analytics information we get. We are not going to be testing everything extensively because we don’t have the resources for that, but we’ll be monitoring the basic metrics and working on improving them.

It takes a village.
This update is the work of a lot of people. It should not be that many, but we don’t have dedicated resources for the website and what we could outsource was limited, so many in the team have been putting a lot of time to this while doing other stuff. At the beginning of the project it was mostly Alex Chopan, Liz, Michael, Janusz and me, but we would frequently pull in people from other parts of the team, like Angelo, Suba, Kira, Brad, Dana, Tungfa, Kot or Ryan. In the last phase, from the time we received the incomplete work from the agency, Strophy has absolutely killed it, with some help from Joshua, Jon, and Nathan. Ivan Borovkov has done all the infrastructure work needed for the site to be up.

Suggestions, bugs, typos…
This is version 0 of the website. We decided to release because what we have now is much better than the old site, but it is far from perfect (and it will never be a finished product!). We have many improvements in the works already, and I’m sure that the community will come up with many great ideas too.

If you have suggestions or find any bugs or typos, we would appreciate that you send them through the support desk, so we have a process in place and are sure that nothing is lost (there is a link to support in the footer of the site).

There are a few things that we are already working on and will be released as they become available:

-New languages.
-More exchanges, price and volume information in the /where-to-buy/ page. Also, and InstantSend filter.
-More DAPI content in the developers page once some code is open sourced and documentation released later in this quarter.
-Mode modules/pages in the businesses section that apply to specific types of businesses (merchants, exchanges…).
-More product information in the site (instead of sending the visitor to docs.dash.org).

We have more in the backlog. We’ll tackle as time allows.

Known migration issues
There is a problem with how the code in three pages handles logo’s urls, so they are not showing in the where-to-buy, where-to-spend and full-list-of-exchanges pages. It works well in the test domain and we can solve it, but we wanted to deploy first and check for a few other things in the final deployment domain before making some changes. The site has more than 1000 pages by now and migration is painful.

Author: Fernando
Original link: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/new-dash-org-site-is-live.43695/#post-207436


About the author


tungfa

Communications

tungfa is responsible for social media communications, and posts both original stories and links to news coverage of Dash from around the web.