Last night we launched a fairly substantial revision to our website. The “top navigation” bar now features new buttons, and we also have a brand new search engine which will function as the heart of our site. This was a “soft launch,” meaning that we are not publicizing it through all our channels yet, until we work out some of the bugs.
Speaking of which, I would really love to get feedback from the Forum community. Take the new search engine for a test drive, and let me know what you think!
I actually spent a good deal of time looking for the speed button to take me to the forum.
I don’t think I ever found one. But eventually I reached the right menu.
Perhaps this is intentional… not so much to slow down my zealous moments… but to
reduce “walking by” traffic at the Forum. Not having a button or link on the front page
is certainly a good way of doing it!
The “broad perception of real estate” which the new design provides seems like a good investment. It improves
the likelihood that a newcomer will see something that is their “hot issue”!!!
Big improvement in usability, I would say. A couple observations:
Under the “people” tab, Sarah Lane Ritchie’s photo is not centered properly in the circle and it is not aesthetically optimal.
Under “about us” / “advisory” council, it looks like Claude Alexander’s first name is Bishop. Nobody else has a title, though presumably several are Reverend or Doctor. So this looks weird to me. Does he want to be listed like that?
Nice putting the annual reports on the giving page.
If I were coming for the first time, I would look at the tab “people” first because of its position. But I think the “topics” tab would probably be a more helpful place for most people to start, as it gives a very good overview of the content of the website. If I were designing things, I would flip the two tabs.
So, are you doing away with the four separate blogs and just having generic BioLogos published articles? You need to do something about the fact that all of your articles are still linked to the separately named blogs, (President’s Notebook, Evolving Evangelical, etc.), but now those links take you to a page that’s empty of content. Ted Davis - Person - BioLogos
Yes yes…web searches. But I think you will find after they bump into an expert article, they end up going to HOME to see how the site is arranged.
If you specifically wanted more casual traffic, nothing says “You are Welcome” like a button
on the very front screen that says, more or less: “Here’s where People Discuss things…”
Fixed. The image file was not formatted properly. Good catch.
This is a complicated internal discussion. PM me if you want more details.
We went back and forth on that. The current strategy is based on the BioLogos approach of putting trust above information, in terms of what changes people’s minds. But intentions and results are not the same thing, of course. We are seriously considering flipping them again.
Yes. The Blogs model was my idea…and it didn’t quite work. The staff blogs were not used as often as originally planned (because writing interesting things is not the main thing we are paid to do), and various other features planned around them never materialized.
The URLs are being changed soon. Your point about the empty blog pages is a good one, I’ll bring that up with the web team.
Just one technical point here: you should really think about moving your main site to HTTPS. The web browser vendors are pushing webmasters hard in that direction and it’s only a matter of time before they start bringing up “Not secure” warnings on sites that don’t, whether they collect user data or not.
Here’s an article by a prominent IT security researcher on the subject:
I view BioLogos with magnification so I get 3 horizontal lines in place of the buttons on the top of the home page. When I click on this, instead of the drop down menu, nothing happens. I am using Chrome on a Mac with Yosemite.
@Larry_Bunce I will forward this to the web team. I’m sorry about your experience, we’ll look into it as soon as we can. EDIT: Try clearing your internet history and cookies and accessing our page again.
I just tried to print a John Walton blog post and when the print dialogue came up it said I was about to print 22 pages. I had to scroll down 8 pages before I got to the beginning of the blog post. It seems the browser (Chrome in this case) print function is extracting all the information from the new navigation bar including picture and profiles of all featured writers and whole table of contents. Even the blog post itself is a very messy format. I had to copy past what I wanted into a Word file to print. It would be nice to have a “print” button along with the social media button that then extracted only the content of that page for printing. The current format is far messier than the old format of the website.
Update, I just tried printing with Internet Explorer and the same thing. I looked at today’s new blog post and it wants to print 10 pages. The blog article doesn’t begin until page 10.
For some reason, when on my iphone, I cannot open the menu icon, and cannot get to the forum since recent updates.
It’s not much of an improvement IMO. I still see posts that are wrong about science, and lots of theology. 
Made me laugh!
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