New front page

It's just... too big. I should have said it in the last thread, but I didn't want to look like a fuddy-duddy: I do not like this, I find it absolutely reprehensible, it makes me a lot disappointed and a little bit sick, and I'm not sure how alone I am in this because no other dissenting voices spoke up at all. But that's a weak sort of thing to say, so I'll make the fair-ish assumption that I'm completely alone in hating this new front page. In that regard I demur my objections in-general and raise a smaller one:

• the thing is too big

Does it have to take up the entire horizontal space? Would it be too much a sacrifice to halve its x and y dimensions?

I would recommend moving the "Less Wrong is a" text to the upper left corner, above the curve of the skull. When I view the page on my laptop, it appears below the fold, so phrases like "curated community blog" and "a community discussion board" appear without any context.

I'm glad that this change happened, but I do have a few nitpicks.

This may only be true for me, but the repeated "community" in "Curated community blog" and "A community discussion board", especially right next to each other in the graphic, is grating to read. Also, as John Maxwell IV mentioned, the edited rationality materials link is only applicable to a small subset of readers, and definitely not relevant for newcomers to the site (which is important so as to raise the sanity waterline). Initially, I actually thought that the edited rationality materials link was going to lead me to the main sequences or an index of the sequences.

Thanks a lot for doing this!

Could we improve the edited rationality materials link? Maybe it could link to the sequences, or a page with a name like "a field guide to the less wrong archives"? I don't think it's current target is very relevant to anyone but meetup group leaders.

For what it's worth, I think our presentation of the sequences could also be improved a fair amount.

• Some of the featured posts are not all that great, e.g. this is one I read recently. Could we ruthlessly pare the sequences down until only the most essential, insight-packed posts remain? The more dense they are with information, the more people will take the time to read them.
• Suggest that it's okay to just read summaries of the sequences, taking the time to read the full post if a concept doesn't seem obvious from the summary. (I see reading about rationality as debugging one's brain, and there isn't much point in reading about bugs one doesn't suffer from much.) The wiki has summaries, and there's also the Reading Yudkowsky series on Common Sense Atheism. I can't be the only one who thinks some of the sequence posts are a little wordy.

I recently proposed having a contest to rewrite the copy on the homepage on the wiki, but no one responded. Maybe this is a good place to ask?

Why does the "rationality materials" link go to a page about meetups? This appears to be a bug.

Any chance we can get rid of the new "Comment author:" bits on every comment? I'm finding it really intrusive as it seems to force more saccades when reading - i.e. my eyes have to jink right to read the author, then back to start the text. Previously, this was unnecessary.

Seems like "Welcome to Less Wrong" should be above the image. Right now it looks weirdly separate from the rest of the page. It seems really huge, and like what's under it is sort of an afterthought.

But then again this could have something to do with it being new and different. Everybody's opinions here will become much more reliable in about a week or two when there's been time to get used to the new look.

Too bloody big.

Please use a browser-size tool, such as http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ — or just experiment with different browser window sizes — to see how much of this page design will actually be visible "above the fold".

for "rationality materials" only "materials" should be a link.

I like it, but I with my monitor settings I have serious trouble seeing the grey outline or "Less Wrong is a:".

Looks great except "Less Wrong is a..." is below all the things that it is, which is really stupid.

Perhaps ellipses at the start and ends of the other link descriptions, and a slight rearrangement of "Curated community blog" and A community discussion board" to make it less ambiguous as to which is supposed to be read first.

When I took Edward Tufte's graphics class one of the questions was about website design. He said the gold standard is the Google News website. Almost all signal and almost no noise. This design is not bad at all but it might work better as an "About" page than as the main page. The main page should be precisely what you were looking for when you entered whatever you put into the search engine when it referred you to the LessWrong main page.

I think the execution could be slightly better but I like the idea of it.

I, for one, really like it.

Perhaps someone could create a flickr or tumblr tag, to let people share screenshots of what the new page looks like on their browser?