Sorry for the tone in previous message; I was tired, and wanted to deliver the information.
I’d ask it this way: What is your core mission? Seems to me it is “providing advice for students”. So I’d recommend to focus 100% on this, and treat everything else as a shiny distraction. (Unless you want to change your mission to “develop an improved version of Anki or Beeminder”. But you don’t have the resources to do both, even if you had experience and ideas.)
I say this because it feels to me like you are not fully commited to the tools you have, and therefore you don’t use them fully. For example, if you knew for sure that you are going to stay with MediaWiki, you would probably put more care into improving the wiki navigation. (But maybe you feel like “meh, this is just some temporary tool, we will use something better later”, and then improving the details feels like a waste of time, if you expect it to change later.)
Seems to me that your current wiki structure uses too much introductions, too much redirection. For example: On the main page, you have a link to “What we offer and why”. Why not put that into the main page? The page “What we offer and why” contains a link to “Learning portal”; the page “Learning portal” contains a link to “Our category on the benefits of learning particular subjects” (and also directly to math, algebra and economics; this part well-done!), and the page “Category:Subject learning benefits” contains a link to e.g. “Chemistry learning benefits”. And the “Chemistry learning benefits” contains a text “We’re still working on this page, so check back later!” (and a hyperlink to a useful topic). -- Uhm, seriously? It takes four clicks to discover the page about to chemistry, only to learn that you have almost nothing about chemistry?
On the other hand, I guess I understand how this all happened. This is a “top down” approach: you create a huge abstract structure where you want to fill the details later. This feels very high-status. But it’s optimized for how you feel about it, not for the convenience of the reader. -- I suggest the opposite, “bottom up” approach. You have the valuable pieces of information (for example the external link to quora article about learning chemistry). That’s the value you provide, and you want to navigate the reader there as easily as possible. So you build the navigation pages around the content you already have, not around the content you wish you had.
For example, one external hyperlink is not enough to make a separate page about chemistry. You probably have more such links for other subjects, so it makes sense to create a page “Advice about specific subjects”, divide it to subjects by headers and subheaders, and put the links there. (In future, when you have more than 10 chemistry-related links, or perhaps if you have 5 chemistry-related links but you also provide a short summary below the link, then it’s the right time to create a separate “Advice about Chemistry” page.) And your main page should link directly to the “Advice about specific subjects” page, because that’s one of the main things you provide. There: Just two clicks, and the reader is reading the Quora article. There is the same information there as before, it’s just easier to find.
Maybe it would be good to have one person researching the information you want to put on the web page, and another person who would maintain the structure of the web. One person to focus on “what” and other person to focus on “how”.
Thanks again. We really appreciate the detailed comment.
I discussed your comment with Vipul, but didn’t have a chance to run the final version of my response by him.
(Unless you want to change your mission to “develop an improved version of Anki or Beeminder”. But you don’t have the resources to do both, even if you had experience and ideas.)
Vipul was making the general point that to date we’ve been focused on content, partially out of virtue of lacking technical skills, and that it could be more socially valuable create a platform. We don’t have concrete ideas for what sort of platform we would make (in particular, we’re not thinking of trying to make an improved version of Anki or Beeminder specifically). If we were to do this, it would constitute a significant shift in mission.
I say this because it feels to me like you are not fully commited to the tools you have, and therefore you don’t use them fully. For example, if you knew for sure that you are going to stay with MediaWiki, you would probably put more care into improving the wiki navigation. (But maybe you feel like “meh, this is just some temporary tool, we will use something better later”, and then improving the details feels like a waste of time, if you expect it to change later.)
Until very recently, we were thinking in terms of the wiki (once fleshed out) being our core offering. I agree that our wiki navigation has much room for improvement – we were more focused on content creation, outreach and fundraising. Now that we’re shifting to maintenance mode, improving the wiki’s navigation is higher priority. However, we expect that people will find our pages through searching for a particular topic via Google more than through the portal.
Seems to me that your current wiki structure uses too much introductions, too much redirection.
Sorry for the tone in previous message; I was tired, and wanted to deliver the information.
I’d ask it this way: What is your core mission? Seems to me it is “providing advice for students”. So I’d recommend to focus 100% on this, and treat everything else as a shiny distraction. (Unless you want to change your mission to “develop an improved version of Anki or Beeminder”. But you don’t have the resources to do both, even if you had experience and ideas.)
I say this because it feels to me like you are not fully commited to the tools you have, and therefore you don’t use them fully. For example, if you knew for sure that you are going to stay with MediaWiki, you would probably put more care into improving the wiki navigation. (But maybe you feel like “meh, this is just some temporary tool, we will use something better later”, and then improving the details feels like a waste of time, if you expect it to change later.)
Seems to me that your current wiki structure uses too much introductions, too much redirection. For example: On the main page, you have a link to “What we offer and why”. Why not put that into the main page? The page “What we offer and why” contains a link to “Learning portal”; the page “Learning portal” contains a link to “Our category on the benefits of learning particular subjects” (and also directly to math, algebra and economics; this part well-done!), and the page “Category:Subject learning benefits” contains a link to e.g. “Chemistry learning benefits”. And the “Chemistry learning benefits” contains a text “We’re still working on this page, so check back later!” (and a hyperlink to a useful topic). -- Uhm, seriously? It takes four clicks to discover the page about to chemistry, only to learn that you have almost nothing about chemistry?
On the other hand, I guess I understand how this all happened. This is a “top down” approach: you create a huge abstract structure where you want to fill the details later. This feels very high-status. But it’s optimized for how you feel about it, not for the convenience of the reader. -- I suggest the opposite, “bottom up” approach. You have the valuable pieces of information (for example the external link to quora article about learning chemistry). That’s the value you provide, and you want to navigate the reader there as easily as possible. So you build the navigation pages around the content you already have, not around the content you wish you had.
For example, one external hyperlink is not enough to make a separate page about chemistry. You probably have more such links for other subjects, so it makes sense to create a page “Advice about specific subjects”, divide it to subjects by headers and subheaders, and put the links there. (In future, when you have more than 10 chemistry-related links, or perhaps if you have 5 chemistry-related links but you also provide a short summary below the link, then it’s the right time to create a separate “Advice about Chemistry” page.) And your main page should link directly to the “Advice about specific subjects” page, because that’s one of the main things you provide. There: Just two clicks, and the reader is reading the Quora article. There is the same information there as before, it’s just easier to find.
Maybe it would be good to have one person researching the information you want to put on the web page, and another person who would maintain the structure of the web. One person to focus on “what” and other person to focus on “how”.
Hi Villiam,
Thanks again. We really appreciate the detailed comment.
I discussed your comment with Vipul, but didn’t have a chance to run the final version of my response by him.
Vipul was making the general point that to date we’ve been focused on content, partially out of virtue of lacking technical skills, and that it could be more socially valuable create a platform. We don’t have concrete ideas for what sort of platform we would make (in particular, we’re not thinking of trying to make an improved version of Anki or Beeminder specifically). If we were to do this, it would constitute a significant shift in mission.
Until very recently, we were thinking in terms of the wiki (once fleshed out) being our core offering. I agree that our wiki navigation has much room for improvement – we were more focused on content creation, outreach and fundraising. Now that we’re shifting to maintenance mode, improving the wiki’s navigation is higher priority. However, we expect that people will find our pages through searching for a particular topic via Google more than through the portal.
Until a month ago or so, we had most of our pages linked to from the front page. It was starting to seem too cluttered, so we switched to a more modular design. Now that we’ve decided not to produce a lot of pages in the near future, it may be better to switch back, or adopt some compromise.