VijayPande wrote:We've been working behind the scenes on a revamp of our web site. It went live today (
http://folding.stanford.edu/home). This is part of our larger plan to make FAH more friendly and easy to use, especially to non-experts.
With that said, we're now thinking about next steps to make FAH more fun and appealing to experts, such as computer enthusiasts and gamers. We're in the early stages of deciding what would be useful there. If you have ideas, please do give us some feedback. As always, we can't implement everything, but we are curious to see what people think.
I just visited this thread regarding the "New web site", without realizing at first that it was started in July
2013 and is thus no longer "new" at all!
And it might very well be that the
current contents of "
FoldingAtHome.org/home/" (to which "
folding.stanford.edu/home" redirects today) might be very different from the then-"new" contents, but I'd like to nevertheless provide some
belated feedback on the current contents. (I also realize that, today, the "naked"
FoldingAtHome.org domain is mapped to the landing page for the new
"TOGETHER WE ARE POWERFUL" campaign, but the "TAKE ME HOME" link at its upper-right corner still links to this current "home" page, making the latter still relevant.)
I'd like to suggest that the visual layout of the "home" page be slightly reorganized, in order to
maximize the "conversion" rate of new, non-expert, visitors who might have somehow been brought directly to this page without yet knowing
anything about FAH ... into enthusiastic
"partners" who not only
start folding themselves, but also actively start recruiting their friends and family to do so as well.
At the very least, the "map of the world" image that currently takes up almost the
entire "real estate" initially visible
"above the fold" -- forcing the newbie visitor to
manually scroll down in order to obtain even the most minimal explanation of "what
is this site?!", without even helping to trigger any curiosity that might provide some "incentive" to actually do so --- should either be eliminated, somehow enhanced, or at least moved down to the very bottom of the page, way "below the fold." It is well known that anything that weakens what a visitor immediately sees in the first seconds after arriving to a new web page, especially if the user will need to proactively perform even the simplest of actions (such as manually scrolling down or clicking on a link or a button), significantly reduces the effectiveness of the page in convincing the user to perform the desired "call-to-action."
For reference, here is what a new visitor initially sees, above the fold, when first landing on the "home" page:
I would guess that the home-page's "conversion rate" would significantly increase if the first things the new visitor sees would instead be rearranged to something like the following (existing) sections, in order:
-
"WHY WE NEED YOU" / "FIGHT DISEASES TOGETHER WITH US."
-
"START FOLDING NOW"
-
"FOLDING?"
-
"LATEST POSTS"
Ultimately, the data from
Google Analytics should be used to choose content and layout that has been empirically shown to maximize effectiveness.