Status



The design work was completed long ago and we are pleased with the results, but we have had problems with the development of the site. Both parts were being done by two parts of the same agency.



We expected to receive the website from them in December and perform the migration process. They missed deadlines and we discovered that they were not doing the multilingual setup as we had requested. We asked them to hand over the work done so we could finish internally or hire someone else.



There were delays in the handover and we didn’t have full access to the files until last week.



We have deployed the site in our infrastructure and evaluated the work done. There are several pieces missing or not up to specification. We believe we can finish all work internally with minimal compromises, but we still need to finish the estimation of how much it will take. Besides the expected content polishing that we expected to do, there is development and infrastructure work to finish, and part is yet to be scheduled. We don’t have internal resources dedicated to this, so these tasks need to be coordinated with the other day to day tasks.



Without all the work fully scheduled, we can’t provide a hard date, but our current plan is to finish the site, complete the migration process, translate the new content and launch in February.





Description



The new site tries to solve some of the problems the current one has:



-Lack of flexibility. It is very difficult to make changes and it requires developers involved, so it has always been very stale. We have severe constraints due to security, though. For that reason, the new site, while much better, still will have some operational limitations.



-Outdated design.



-Confusing structure.





We have defined four audiences that require a different experience and are the only items in the top menu (plus the language selector).



- Individuals . We have simplified to the most common experience: get wallet > get dash > use dash. There are many other experiences that users will have, but many times they will happen through a partner, so we don’t want to complicate this yet.



- Businesses . This is a very broad category. The needs of a small retailer have nothing to do with the needs of a payment processor. In the future, we need to break down this one further, but first, we want to launch and start seeing traffic data. At some point businesses probably need their own full-on site/subdomain. In version 1 of this page, we will be providing bits of information so we can guide their research into Dash.



- Developers . This category partially overlaps with businesses since many devs work for businesses. We’ll have the technical information here and the economic one there. This page is intended to be the starting point for devs that are interested in our protocol. The biggest appeal will come with the launch of Evolution and Dash becoming a platform on top of which they can build. Until then, this page is more limited and we’ve left out of version 1 some of the work we’ve already done. A big part of this effort to attract developers will be a new set of technical documentation that the team is working on. It will be possible to access the technical documentation from this devs page, with links and explanations, but the technical documentation will be hosted in a subdomain. It runs on a specialized platform that will allow visitors to play with APIs and code in the browser.



- Community . This one is also quite broad. Here we’ve put together all the things that don’t fully belong in the other ones (social, general learning resources, governance, mining, masternodes, news). One could argue that these things are of interest to the other three audiences. We agree, and there are a few cross calls among audiences, but we believe that if you are a new user to Dash, you probably should not be distracted by proposals or masternode information. That will come further down your journey.



The main page for each of these audiences has several call-to-actions that lead to other pages. We’ve tried that the user doesn’t leave the site to get to the wiki or another dash related website in less than two clicks because that is bad user experience. There are exceptions to this, but they are clearly marked as links out so the user doesn’t get surprised.



All first level pages, except the developers one, have an image on top that brings in positive associations. Besides that, there are a lot of custom illustrations around the site so it has a recognizable and cohesive style.



There are also a few common pages that are linked from the footer (team, contact and that kind of stuff).



Once it is launched we will be analyzing the traffic to improve the content and structure, but our resources are limited and we won’t be able to do everything we would like to.





What about dashcrypto.org?



I have worked with Julio over the last couple of months and talked a lot about current and future website. We agree on a lot of things and disagree on a few, but he is a solid business guy and I trust him to deliver on what he proposes.



His site is not a replacement for dash.org. He wants to do things that we can’t or won’t do on dash.org. Some examples:



-Market Dash as an investment. We have always been against that because we focus on the utility side of Dash, think crypto is a dangerous investment that is very difficult to promote fairly, and are worried about SEC and the risk of Dash being considered a security.



-A/B testing. He wants to run constant experiments with the content so he improves messaging and optimize conversions. With the new site, we plan to analyze traffic and make changes with that information, but we don’t have the resources for the kind of work that he wants to do. However, if he ends up doing it, it would be great to see the results so we can also optimize the messaging in dash.org where applicable. Another thing to consider is that we can’t test anything in dash.org. We need to be more conservative with messages than what he needs to be.



-Be a portal for the whole ecosystem. While we would love to have everything in dash.org, the truth is that we need to be very careful with what we include. We include third parties in dash.org and have some disclaimers, but we also leave out many things that, while attractive, we are worried that could backfire on the project for some reason in the future. Having a comprehensive view somewhere would be useful.



In summary, both sites have some overlap but are not trying to do/be the same.