With ARK moving at the speed of crypto, we set out to overhaul the ARK.io website to keep up with our development of products, services and infrastructure. Today, we are unveiling the all-new ARK.io website featuring new content, an improved user experience and a clearer vision.
The all-new ARK.io website launches today.ARK’s new website is the culmination of collaboration across all departments within the ARK Team. The executive, development, marketing and communications teams all came together to tackle this important project, and it is the opinion of this author that the result is something the entire community can appreciate.
Visit the all-new website here: https://ARK.io
User and developer hubs act as portals to get to the right information.
Distinct Audience Segmentation
The overall ARK Ecosystem has all kinds of people within it, and the new ARK website is designed to speak directly to all of them. Users can easily see the ways they can buy, spend and use their ARK tokens, as well as how to participate in the ARK community. Developers can be exposed to all of the technical moving parts associated with ARK technology while learning how to build with, and contribute to the platform. Unlike previously, in many cases they won’t even have to leave the website to do so.
- The User Hub exposes visitors to the advantages of ARK, and allows them to learn more about ARK’s open source projects like the ARK Wallets and ARK Explorer. Information on how to buy, spend and use ARK is available, including the Spend App VISA card which can be linked to ARK, and the ARKTippr Tip Bot .
- The Developer Hub allows programmers to dive into all the technical aspects surrounding the ARK Ecosystem, including the intuitive ARK Deployer , which allows developers from all walks of life to create an entire standalone blockchain customized to their needs. The hub also acts as a portal to documentation, GitHub, bounties and rewards, the ARK Community Fund, delegate information, the Powered by ARK Program and more.
Whilst the new website places a key focus on the user and developer audience groups, the keen-eyed among you may notice the omission of an enterprise focus on the new website. This is a conscious and strategic decision.
An enterprise audience comes with their own needs and challenges they are looking to solve; they come with expectations around branding, business structure, content, tone of voice, process, products and services and more. In short, all this means they have to be approached and catered for in an entirely different way to both our user and developer audiences. In order to target and provision for an enterprise audience appropriately a standalone website, and tailored commercial approach is needed. This is something we are actively exploring and developing. More information on this can be found in our roadmap, and we’ll keep you updated as we progress.
The new website features live integrations with external resources such as GitHub.
Live Integrations & Dynamic Data
In our recent Consensus 2019 presentation , we mentioned that our new website will literally come to life with live integrations and reasons to keep coming back. The new ARK website delivers on these promises by providing a steady stream of new information pertaining to the status of the ARK Ecosystem. Take a look at a few examples below:
- GitHub —Repositories of code can be accessed directly from the site.
- Custom Projects —The status of custom projects with special bounties can be viewed.
- Bounties — Community developers work hand in hand with the team to enhance ARK. The site features leader boards and a live commit feed.
- AIPs — ARK Improvement Proposals allow the community to participate in the future of ARK. The new site allows visitors to browse and submit AIPs.
The progress-based roadmap system has been updated with more details.More
Detailed Roadmap
In accordance with plans laid out in the new whitepaper, we have enhanced the ARK roadmap on the new website. Roadmap items have been added with detailed sub-tasks and the quarters where work is expected to take place. The percentage-progress system allows visitors to see how far along each item is. The roadmap can also be filtered by the below:
- Completed — shows all of the items that were already completed
- In Development — highlights what we are actively developing in the next four quarters.
- Exploratory —these are the items we want to develop in the near future. When these items move into active development it will be reflected in the roadmap by moving these items into the In Development section
User Experience & SEO
The new website has been developed with on-page and technical SEO best practice in mind along with the use of latest technologies such as — modern image formats, lightweight CSS framework (Tailwind CSS), JavaScript framework (VueJS), Laravel framework for back-end, preloading of the content that is firstly visible, and TypeKit for loading of the fonts, …
All pages have been mapped to user goals and optimally structured to boost both engagement and user experience metrics. A full keyword analysis was undertaken prior to content creation, not only to maximize search engine visibility and click through rates — but to ensure content relevancy to the site visitor related to their queries.
The website’s broad range of pages and sections means that it caters to multiple audiences with different levels of intent — containing content with carefully crafted call-to-actions that improve flows from site-entry to conversion.
The website platform is both SEO-friendly and highly flexible allowing future functionality improvements. This reworked architecture has allowed serious improvements in many technical aspects, most notably with page speed and crawling — Google PageSpeed improved drastically, on desktop we now have a score of 100% (old site was78%) mobile has a score of 90%+ (old site was22%).
Since SEO (like our website) is a fluid, ever-evolving process we’ll be improving and monitoring the metrics as the site beds in, and going forward to ensure that we are continually optimizing.
What’s Next?
The new site launched today is just the start. Over the coming months we’ll be improving and updating the site with new sections, modules and pages as our development progresses and our outreach efforts grow. Here are a few examples of some of the future improvements currently outlined for the website:
- Product Pages — More details covering ARK products and projects such as ARK Explorer, ARK Pay and ARK marketplace as development moves forward. These pages will act as a front door for visitors to learn more.
- Service Pages — More details covering services and programs ARK offers, like the Powered by ARK Program, for example.
- Platform Concepts/Topics — More content that expands on the core topics surrounding ARK technology, bringing in TL;DRs of concepts someone might find in the whitepaper, for example.
- Blog/Resources Hub — Clean and obvious presentation of external resources from within the new site and self-managed blogging CMS.
Reporting Issues
We always welcome feedback. If you come across any bugs or issues on the new website and would like to report them, please open an issue on our Github: https://github.com/ArkEcosystem/ark.io-issues
Thanks to the Community
The ARK community is a driving force for everything that we do. Community feedback on our current site played an important role in the design and execution of our new iteration. So, from all the team here at ARK we would like to give the community our deepest thanks for all your support and encouragement.
Take a look at the new website by visiting https://ark.io
