I already told Pramit how excited I am that Pontoon is finally getting the homepage it deserves and how happy I am with the work he’s doing.
I’m glad so many of you have provided feedback, which will be very valuable in the next steps of the development. I’d like to make two high-level comments to address some of the recurring topics.
#1 Target audience
As of today, the primary target audience of Pontoon is Mozilla and the only target audience of pontoon.mozilla.org instance is Mozilla. The homepage should reflect that. Not only by being Mozilla-centric, but also by being the same on pontoon.mozilla.org and when you set up your own instance.
When the situation changes, we should create a general-purpose pontoon.io instance as @adngdb pointed out and even make it easier to create a custom per-instance homepage. But today, given the quality of support & documentation we can offer to 3rd parties, I believe it’s helpful to clearly communicate who’s our target audience, starting from the frontpage.
#2 Call to action (CTA)
Knowing the target audience makes it easier to define a call to action, which lets users know what to do next. Specifically, our target audience for the homepage and it’s main CTA should be the new contributors to localization at Mozilla, because over 85% of existing localizers use a custom homepage (team dashboard). I also don’t think the (new) PMs would benefit a lot from the homepage, because they usually approach us directly before they start managing projects.
The “Localize Firefox” CTA, Pontoon being introduced as a “tool to localize Firefox” and no obvious path to selecting other projects indeed make the homepage too Firefox-oriented. That said, I believe Firefox should still be given a special treatment (same as on mozilla.org), because I believe it’s the primary magnet for new contributors to localization at Mozilla.
I think something along the lines of “Localize Firefox or pick another Mozilla project” that @delphine pointed out is the way to go.