Hello,

I'm excited to tell you that the long-awaited design for the welcome page is ready. If you are curious, you can see it here now.

While working on this, I got the chance to work with some great folks from the Public Lab community and with their tireless input and feedback, we hopefully succeeded in creating something that you will all love to use (special thanks to @warren, @liz, and @stevie for their suggestions).

(The conversation can be found here.)

The page aims to introduce Public Lab to first-time users. The goal is to offer a friendly welcome ('welcome', 'you're not alone', 'everyone can contribute') and to inform (this is what we do, this is what you can do).

The page is divided into clearly defined sections (six of them). The design is simple and clear. The website should display nicely on both a laptops and mobile devices.

The standard (site-wide) header and footer sections will be added later on.

Here we go:

Section 1

The header features a welcoming image, a friendly welcoming message, a prompt to sign up (with expectations to follow a code of conduct) and sharing the various social media links.

Section 2

The next section is a short "About us," with another friendly image. Public Lab is involved in many activities and can mean different things to different people - I think the copy here is important and might need further clarification.

There is also a call to the action for those looking to take action immediately.

The next two sections are the main focus of the website: speaking to people passionate about a particular cause or people that want to connect to someone else from the community (either through the wiki, project, call, meetup etc)

Section 3

Assuming that a lot of new users will come to Public Lab because they are passionate about a particular environmental issue - be it local or not - we featured the most commonly tagged issues. The tags are ordered by frequency of use (in the wiki pages).

Section 4

There are many different ways of contributing to Public Lab and connecting with other community members. This section aims to display the four methods of communicating in a clear and approachable way.

Section 5

For those that are interested in DIY people and those wanting to buy a specific toolkit. My feeling is that this might be people coming here following social media links.

Section 6

For the more analytical users - that made it to the bottom of the page - that are new to community science.

And that's it! :)

Thank you for reading this. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Eva