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Divine Attah-Ohiemi
Divine Attah-Ohiemi

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Re-styling Debian's Download Page

main points from this blog post:

I am tasked with contributing to the debianhugo project which aim is to re-design the old debian pages and make the content better accessible. We've since reached a significant milestone and migrated multiple pages including the start, intro, news and now the download page.

creating "simple" and "advanced" download pages

At first we made the "simple" download page:

  • target audience; less experienced users
  • only added more common download arhitectures/options i.e amd64-64 bit pc and arm64
  • descriptive content for easy user experience; listing positives and negatives of each option, adding download sizes
  • interactive download cards with iso, torrent and debian-cd mirror selections.

"advanced" download page:

  • more download architectures and options including testing release streams
  • straight to point content

challenges/issues while developing

The mirror selection option while it might help with faster downloads depending on the region is still somewhat a manual proccess on the user end and could come with various complications like the chosen debian-cd mirror not having the latest version of debian.

We're looking into testing if the delivery of the images/ISOs is also possible to be done through the Fastly CDN, this would prevent us to provide manual mirror selection.

Top comments (1)

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nielsle profile image
nielsle

Perhaps use wizard with radio buttons or html select to ask one question at a time: 1) Do you want a live disk 2) Choose a release 3) Choose a medium 4) Choose a desktop environment. Include a div with a 10 line help text that explains the active question and links to the wiki.