WIP: Make download instructions more accessible

I have a few more stashed changes but want to first monitor what effect these have.

Changes:

• Removed purple background
• Added steps
• Increased font size and margins
• Reorganized some links
• Only show Centos specific warning when Centos is selected
• Fixed one of the Google Analytics EE events being reported as CE

I took a look at the history of the downloads pages (EE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commits/master/source/downloads-ee/index.html.haml) and we had Google Analytics tracking (before June 2016) and then swapped to Marketo. Could this explain a drop in numbers when looking at GA. There are a few more tracking things I want to discuss with you.

I don't link the h1 title style, we can ask a designer for a nicer heading design.

Closes #1056 (closed)

added 1 commit

• 63a56c2e - Removed purple-bg & newsletter, cleaned up look, fix ee reported as ce

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changed title from WIP: Make blog download instructions more accessible to WIP: Make download instructions more accessible

assigned to @JobV

Sounds a bit too much, to me

5 easy steps

I'd say we just leave this change out.

Sounds good will revert

What is the thinking in removing the mailing list?

Obviously the page is cleaner without this, but do we reach our goals? Our goal is convert people to use EE, whether that is from 0 or from CE. Having emails is incredibly important to us.

Did you look at any data for signup from this page? Maybe there are ways to improve how we did it before (including the layout and how we handle this on mobile), but not having the ability to collect emails here might be a net loss for GitLab.

I see the download page as the end of a funnel and by putting a newsletter signup before a user has selected a download operating system and gotten through all the steps, we may be distracting them from completing a download. I think we could show the newsletter signup form as a final step, once a operating system has been selected. What are your thoughts on this?

Other areas of the site create funnels with specific goals to get users to signup to our newsletter or register to get a downloadable asset, I don't think the end of every funnel has to do more than one action (but including it at the end of the download steps as mentioned above could work - as it is a linear follow-on action rather than a branch).

@SeanPackham I propose you investigate how many sign ups we get from this page. This should be relatively straightforward to find out. Depending on that, let's make a decision.

I think having the sign up at the bottom makes more sense indeed, but if we can do this data-driven, that might be worth it.

@JobV there have been 541 newsletter sign ups from the downloads page in the last 30 days. In the lifetime of that forms existence (4 Nov 2015) there have been 7.817 email signups on that page.

@SeanPackham and compared to the total of signups we got over that month?

I guess this is a significant amount, so we shouldn't remove the sign up altogether at the very least.

cc @regisF

@JobV I'll let the Growth PM manage any changes to the downloads page from now on but I am /cc @jjcordz in, JJ could you share the total signups we get a month with Job?

mentioned in issue #1114 (closed)

@SeanPackham @JobV that's indeed a very significant number of signups. In the new version, I'll make sure we take that into account.

@SeanPackham @JobV @regisF There are a few different ways a person can sign up for the Newsletter:

• Blog page
• Contact Us page
• Download Page

Since Nov 2015 to date, there have been 10.341 signups, broken down in the following manner:

• Blog page: 1.948
• Contact Us page: 630
• Download page: 7.968

I personally feel it would make most since to add space for Newsletter registrations just above the footer on every page, so it is uniform across the site. Also, to improve database integrity having first name & email address at a minimum would be preferred, ideally I would like first/last & email.

@jjcordz what I like with putting the newsletter box right on their faces on the Download page, is the fact that we can tune the message by saying "Do you want to be notified when we update GitLab?" - because you are more likely to want to subscribe when you download CE...

Making the newsletter box in the footer makes also sense, I'll create an issue for this.

Closing this MR, considering the newsletter signups is mostly driven by the download page.

closed