Today we launched the new design for the Mozilla Developer Network Web site. We’ve been working on this for a long time, with discussions starting as much as a year ago, and actual coding starting this past summer. It was a huge effort involving a ton of brilliant people, and I’m thrilled with the results! Not only is the new design more attractive, but it has a number of entirely new features that will help you find what you want—and read it—more easily, and in more places, than ever before.

Updated home page

The new home page has a completely revamped organization, with a large search box front and center. Below that are links to key areas of the MDN Web site, including much of our most-used documentation, such as the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML docs, content about Firefox OS and developer tools, and the brand-new Mozilla Developer Program, whose goal is to help Web developers learn more and more quickly.

Zoning in

You may notice the new concept we call “zones” in the screenshot above. A “zone” is a new concept we’ve added, wherein we can construct a special topic area that can accumulate documentation and samples from across MDN to cover that topic. For example, the Firefox OS zone provides documentation about Firefox OS, which involves not only Firefox OS-specific content, but information about HTML, CSS, and so forth.

Here you see our new zone navigation bar along the left side of the screen, promotional boxes for specific content, and lists of key articles.

Search and ye shall find

Search has been significantly improved; we now have an on-site search powered by Elastic Search rather than using Google, which lets us customize the search in useful ways. One particularly helpful feature is the addition of search filters. Once you’ve done a search, you can narrow the search further by using these filters. For example, here’s a search for “window element”:

Well. 5186 results is a lot. You can use our new search filters, though, to narrow those results down a bit. You can choose to restrict your search to one or more topic areas, types of document, and/or skill level. Let’s look for articles specifically about the DOM:

It’s worth noting here that these filters rely on content being tagged properly, and much of our content is still in the process of being tagged (especially regarding skill level). This is something we can always use help with, so please drop into #mdn on IRC if you’re interested in helping with this quick and easy way to help improve our search quality!

Responsive design

An area in which MDN was sorely lacking in the past was responsive design. This is the concept of designing content to adapt to the device on which it’s being used. The new MDN design makes key adjustments to its layout based on the size of your screen.

Here’s the Firefox zone’s landing page in standard “desktop” mode. This is what you’ll see browsing to it in a typical desktop browser environment. Here’s what the same page looks like in “small desktop” mode. This is what the page looks like when your browser window is smaller, such as when viewing on a netbook. And here’s the same page in “mobile” view. The page’s layout is adjusted to be friendlier on a mobile device.

Each view mode rearranges the layout, and in some cases removes less important page elements, to improve the page’s utility in that environment.

Quicklinks

The last new feature I’ll point out (although not the last improvement by a long shot!) is the new quicklink feature. We now have the ability to add a collection of quicklinks to pages; this can be done manually by building the list while editing the page, or by using macros.

Here’s a screenshot of the quicklinks area on the page for the CSS background property:

The quicklinks in the CSS reference provide fast access to related properties; when looking at a background-related property, as seen above, you get quick access to all of the background-related properties at once.

There’s also an expandable “CSS Reference” section. Clicking it gives you an alphabetical list of all of the CSS reference pages:

As you see, this lets you quickly navigate through the entire CSS reference without having to backtrack to the CSS landing page. I think this will come as an enormous relief to a lot of MDN users!

To top it off, if you want to have more room for content and don’t need the quicklinks, you can hide them by simply clicking the “Hide sidebar” button at the top of the left column; this results in something like the following:

The quicklinks feature is rapidly becoming my favorite feature of this new MDN look-and-feel. Not all of our content is making full use of it yet, but we’re rapidly expanding its use. It makes navigating content so much easier, and is easy to work with as a content creator on MDN, too.

Next steps

Our development team and the design and UX teams did a fantastic job building this platform, and our community of writers threw in their share as well: between testing the changes to providing feedback, not to mention contributing and updating enormous amounts of documentation to take advantage of new features and to look right in the new design, I’m enormously proud of everyone involved.

There’s plenty left to do. There are new platform features yet to be built, and the content always needs more work. If you’d like to help, drop into #mdn to talk about content or #mdndev to talk about helping with the platform itself. And feel free to file bugs with your suggestions and input.

See you online!

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