There are really a lot of instances where the same photo was used for multiple images. That should probably be fixed.
There are a lot of requests for js and css files. If they’re coming from your server, you should bundle them up into one file. Better yet, sources like jQuery should be coming from a CDN like Google for these reasons. Your webdev should check out Yahoo’s website about performance if they haven’t already.
The carousel on the front page is something that IMO should be expunged from the web. Replace the “slide left” behavior with the “fade in/out” used on the “What we do” page, for a good start.
The pages look pretty terrible on my phone (Motorola backflip running Android using built-in browser). A lot of the text disappears off the right side of the screen. The header links should probably be formatted differently for mobile—the header section looks like a mess.
The page about mobile apps should have a note that they are “Coming Soon!” or something like that—I expect to be able to download the apps from that page, or at least link to descriptions.
The page about groups should link to some place where you can get in touch with a local group.
The CFAR link on the SPARC page looks like a tab, so it is surprising when it redirects to the CFAR website (ETA: Though this would not be the first website to use that pattern). Otherwise, nice use of CSS tabs. For some reason, the text on the SPARC page has massive amounts of whitespace in the source—you may want to trim it on the back end, though since you’re sending resources gzipped it shouldn’t make a real difference.
I agree (in the sense that this is what I do with my own
sites), but here’s a pro-www
argument.
(More accurately it’s an argument against using a “bare”
domain name in web addresses; that link itself does not
start with “www.”, but it does start with “faq.”.)
There is one advantage of “www”—if you write the website address without “http://” part, only the “www.appliedrationality.org″, some softwares will recognize that it is a web link and will make it clickable; the same thing will not happen with ”appliedrationality.org″. (For example if you write that in an e-mail, or a comment on a web page.)
I don’t know how much this is useful in real life. Could possibly generate a few extra links and higher pagerank.
Either way, some people will write the “www” part even if it’s not there, so if it is not the official one, it should redirect.
Initial impressions:
There are really a lot of instances where the same photo was used for multiple images. That should probably be fixed.
There are a lot of requests for js and css files. If they’re coming from your server, you should bundle them up into one file. Better yet, sources like jQuery should be coming from a CDN like Google for these reasons. Your webdev should check out Yahoo’s website about performance if they haven’t already.
The carousel on the front page is something that IMO should be expunged from the web. Replace the “slide left” behavior with the “fade in/out” used on the “What we do” page, for a good start.
The URL should be appliedrationality.org, not www.appliedrationality.org. http:// already tells you that you’re looking for the web server. The redirect should go from www.appliedrationality.org to appliedrationality.org, not the other way around. Obviously, links such as the logo should be changed to match.
The pages look pretty terrible on my phone (Motorola backflip running Android using built-in browser). A lot of the text disappears off the right side of the screen. The header links should probably be formatted differently for mobile—the header section looks like a mess.
The page about mobile apps should have a note that they are “Coming Soon!” or something like that—I expect to be able to download the apps from that page, or at least link to descriptions.
The page about groups should link to some place where you can get in touch with a local group.
The CFAR link on the SPARC page looks like a tab, so it is surprising when it redirects to the CFAR website (ETA: Though this would not be the first website to use that pattern). Otherwise, nice use of CSS tabs. For some reason, the text on the SPARC page has massive amounts of whitespace in the source—you may want to trim it on the back end, though since you’re sending resources gzipped it shouldn’t make a real difference.
SPARC: GET http://www.appliedrationality.org/images/body.png 404 (Not Found)
The “What is Rationality?” page doesn’t seem to have a clear answer to that question. Certainly not on a skim.
In general, great job.
I agree (in the sense that this is what I do with my own sites), but here’s a pro-www argument. (More accurately it’s an argument against using a “bare” domain name in web addresses; that link itself does not start with “www.”, but it does start with “faq.”.)
The arguments are good, but as you say they do not support ‘www’ as opposed to any other prefix. ‘www’ should be consigned to the flames.
There is one advantage of “www”—if you write the website address without “http://” part, only the “www.appliedrationality.org″, some softwares will recognize that it is a web link and will make it clickable; the same thing will not happen with ”appliedrationality.org″. (For example if you write that in an e-mail, or a comment on a web page.)
I don’t know how much this is useful in real life. Could possibly generate a few extra links and higher pagerank.
Either way, some people will write the “www” part even if it’s not there, so if it is not the official one, it should redirect.
The 404 page has a typo: “retourn” rather than “return”.
The majority of photos were taken from my Less Wrong/Rationalist photo archive - feel free to use more from there to expand the photo collection :)
Quoted for emphasis.