Site Design

Question

We should make our site look more "Physics-ish" than it currently looks. This is achieved not only by changing the logo, but changing many other images, and etc. 

Not only should we make the site more physics-ish, but also concentrate on the usability and user-friendliness aspect of the site.  

So use this thread to suggest improvements to the design of the site.           

Answer 1

The main page http://www.physicsoverflow.org/ should _not_ come up with ''Recent activity in Q&A'' as now, but instead with

- (left half top) an inviting summary of what PO is,

- (right half top) a questionnaire asking for the most important user preferences (namely ''I am interested in [menu of categories and/or representative tags]'') where one or more could be marked,

- buttons "search'' and ''invitation to register'', and

- a button ''view'', which upon clicking gives (on the same page but below the top) to new readers the questions with highest number of votes and/or highest answer quality (and a menu to switch to different modes) on the interests selected before. 

Readers with an account should be able to customize in their profile their preferences about how the main page appears.

Justification:

When visiting a site, I first want to see what is interesting about it (else I leave it) before I am interested in the current traffic. For example, in Wikipedia, who wants to know which entries have been changed most recently? Only the dedicated workers. Everyone else wants to be able to choose a topic of interest.

The content is there upon an additional click, but which content to view should not be left to the accidents of the day. If one wants an inviting general purpose content, one should select from each of a set of representative tags (the ones which are specified in the menu for defining the interest) the one or two best-answered questions. These could be listed next to the menu of tags. to illustrate these. (The list of all tags is useless and should not be visible directly.)

Comments

I disagree with this. Looking at my own experience with many sites, I (and in fact most users) prefer to have a list of the content itself on the main page. It looks more inviting, and shows the activity going on. Having a main page with a truckload of useless things is not going to invite anyone.  

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I still don't agree with this post even after your edit; it is most inviting when the content list is right there upon page load. 90% of users won't bother to click any further, unless they see a description (question titles) of the content there itself on page load.    

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Well, I don't know about other users, but my way of looking at other sites is quite different.

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Yes, I prefer to immediately see the list of questions too, it allowes me to immediately jump on posts I am interested in.

Conversely, on Physic s Forums which offers a landing page with a similar in spirit design as proposed here, I face a hell of trouble in efficiently finding things I could be interested in. This is probably among the reasons why I not so often post my too dumb for PO questions there, even though I know that some good people are there and nice physics can get done ...

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I had no problem with the PhysicsForums entry page, only with their politics of not allowing to link to unpublished matter.