I tried working a bit on a private (not publicly accessible) Wordpress mockup of this website, centered more on the news/progress aspect of the replication endeavor. There would be several advantages in this, but also disadvantages. I'm willing to discuss this more in detail if there's any interest.

Hi Echo,

Some good ideas there, many which we can implement quite easily. Do you have experience with Joomla as everything works and we all have experience with it (at least the ones actively blogging).

Bob

Very little experience with Joomla. The reason is that I've always found Wordpress much easier to maintain and faster to use with small websites which focus primarily on the addition of blog-like updates/news/new content over time like quantumheat.org.

Joomla is more like a general-purpose CMS with "web 2.0" features. It's more flexible than Wordpress but also comes with some disadvantages.

Anyway, for the current site, at the very least the page hierarchy/structure would have to be remade from scratch, in order to improve at least a tiny bit in usability.

Misc suggestions.

Homepage
This should show the latest blogposts. They are the thing on which this website is mostly based and number one reason why users keep returning.

Blogposts
There shouldn't be different sections. It gets confusing and hard to follow as each one needs a different RSS feed. It's better to make them part of the same hierarchy. Different subjects are better subdivided in "categories" like Wordpress does. Video postings currently under the "watch" section are better included as part of the same blog hierarchy too. In this way videos can be commented and discussed without having to log on Youtube.

These could go under the same page as there's little reason to keep them separate
It might also be an idea to use less ambiguous terms to collectively define them, like "mission".

• Initiate
• Educate
• Replicate

An Experiment Overview section could be added in order to present in detail specifications, protocols and image gallery for each experiment. These pages would not be subject to much change. If each experiment has its own subsection, including photos, this would make possible to drop the "gallery" section.

In my mockup the live data page, youtube channel and experiment log links are always accessible, no matter where. I think it's important to offer such quick access because people who come to this site want to know quickly what's going on with current experiments. Right now it takes too much time (and clicks) to find out this.

I agree with many of the points you make, I have just done the gallery as you proposed with breadcrumbs to ease navigation as a temp measure though I feel it could be grouped with the experiments also. I will rationalise group and re-name sections.

The template is "responsive" which means it scales and re-organises for mobile/tablet. I need to tweak the video sizes for that to work properly also. Not all videos correspond to an experiment, so how best to address that?

I was thinking of the default page (the Follow) page being a series of "Large Buttons" that show the active experiment groups and some key facts.

Keep the ideas coming - I am off to supper now (18:30 here) but may be able to work on this later today.

Bob

I temporarily opened to the public my mockup so you can better understand how I would lay out this website:

mfmptest.wordpress.com/

Apparently it's got a built-in mobile template. Try checking it out if it works.

Videos don't need to be associated to experiments. They can be added as new blogposts in their own category. See how I dealt with that in the mockup website.

I see some changes have been performed, that's a good step to the right direction, although some work still needs to be done especially with how sections are laid out/structured (especially for the blog section).

I would change in the menu bar on the top the naming of the following elements:

Follow -> Blog
Discuss -> Forum

If possible, I would make the "Blog" caption in bold font or use some other method to make it more visible. In my view, though, the blog section (which again, I think needs a different layout than its current one) should really be the website homepage.