New Changes to DZone Website
Navigation has been redesigned and we're now featuring content experts in our Zones!
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Join For FreeHello DZone Contributors!
We have an exciting update to share with you all about some changes to our website. As the scope of content on DZone has continued to grow and expand over the years, we realized that the navigation to and from our Zones has become a bit crowded and difficult to navigate, so we’ve spent the past several months rebuilding and redefining what this will look like.
First and foremost, as with any development project, this is a work in process! What you see now will continue to grow and evolve over the next few weeks and months as we gather feedback from you, our community, and work internally to improve the experience even further.
UI Navigation
As you all know, our community exists to create the highest quality expert content resources available covering the entire spectrum of software development, but that content only becomes useful if readers can find the information they’re looking for quickly. When thinking about how best to organize our content, it seemed most natural to us to follow the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). As this is something almost all our readers and contributors as familiar with, it made the most sense.
With this navigation update, our main goal is to make the content easier for you to consume by allowing you to focus on the areas that align with your development needs. We’ve also made sure to better surface more helpful resources such as our Refcards and Trend Reports per topic to help you to further expand your development journey.
When you visit DZone.com, the very first thing you’ll see at the top of the page are five categories covering each of the five stages of the SDLC:
Coding
Also known as the build stage of the SDLC, coding focuses on the writing and programming of a system. The Zones in this category take a hands-on approach to equip developers with the knowledge about frameworks, tools, and languages that they can tailor to their own build needs.
Culture and Methodologies
In our Culture and Methodologies category, dive into Agile, career development, team management, and methodologies such as Waterfall, Lean, and Kanban. Whether you're looking for tips on how to integrate Scrum theory into your team's Agile practices or you need help prepping for your next interview, our resources can help set you up for success.
Data Engineering
Welcome to the Data Engineering category of DZone, where you will find all the information you need for AI/ML, big data, data, databases, and IoT. As you determine the first steps for new systems or reevaluate existing ones, you're going to require tools and resources to gather, store, and analyze data. The Zones within our Data Engineering category contain resources that will help you expertly navigate through the SDLC Analysis stage.
Software Design and Architecture
Software design and architecture focus on the development decisions made to improve a system's overall structure and behavior in order to achieve essential qualities such as modifiability, availability, and security. The Zones in this category are available to help developers stay up to date on the latest software design and architecture trends and techniques.
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
The final step in the SDLC, and arguably the most crucial, is the testing, deployment, and maintenance of development environments and applications. DZone's category for these SDLC stages serves as the pinnacle of application planning, design, and coding. The Zones in this category offer invaluable insights to help developers test, observe, deliver, deploy, and maintain their development and production environments.
We have included each of our existing 14 Zones in the new navigation for those who were already comfortable and familiar with our content categories, but we have expanded them as well to include some additional areas of software development. All in all, we now have 25 different Zones that our content can fit into.
I encourage you to poke around the new navigation and explore!
Expert Spotlight
While a new UI/UX is great, what’s even more exciting for our contributors is that we will now be highlighting some of our top experts and knowledge leaders within each section of content! Within each Zone under the SDLC stages, we will be highlighting four experts from our community who are some of our best and most active contributors, those who are truly knowledge leaders in their space!
We will be rotating these on a regular cadence and experts will be chosen based on their knowledge of the discipline, the quality of their contributions, and how active they are within our community. You could be one of our featured experts!
What Impact Will These Changes Have on Me as a Contributor?
Short answer: None! Right now, the only thing changing is how readers and contributors will navigate the site to find all of your great content! And there’s nothing you need to do right now for the Expert Spotlight, except to keep writing great content!
While there aren’t any chances to the contributor processes right now, this change will surface your content within more areas across the website, making it much easier for both you and our readers to find. Our goal is to help even more people discover all your great articles!
The process for submitting articles will remain the same, and while we are working on some very exciting updates for all of our contributors, we don’t want to give away everything at once. If you’re not already a contributor and are interested in seeing your content featured on the front page, and maybe even join our Expert Spotlight one day, be sure to check out our DZone Contributor page for more information. You can also email editors@dzone.com if you have more questions.
For now, explore the new navigation, check out our first crop of expert contributors, and stay tuned for a lot more great things coming in 2023! Thank you all so much for all you do for us. We couldn’t do any of this without your support and we encourage you to provide us any feedback you might have about the new changes rolling out. You can always reach us at community@dzone.com.
Sincerely,
DZone TeamOpinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
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