Adding to Aegon, shouldn't the "Welcome by David Baker" be the first link of the "Join Rosetta@home" section ? First one wants to know about the project and then one signs up, downloads the software, etc. Generally, I think the links intended for first time visitors of the site should be further up; the ones for the "returning customers" can be further down. Also, I only noticed by chance that the section headings ("Join Rosetta@home", "About", ...) are actually links. Perhaps it would help to have some symbol in front of them (triangle ?) to make that more obvious.

I made some updates that address some of the suggestions/comments below.

I made some updates that address some of the suggestions/comments below.

Hi David. Thanks for for so quickly implementing our suggestions (I like the new U Washington logo).

I hope you don't mind if I bug you with one more suggestion: We all value the sort of 'personal' interaction we have with the project members through the forum. However, it is a bit hard to find out how David B and David K and the other team members we have contact with actually look. ;-) I googled this 1999 photo of David B in front of a rather creatively filled black board



and there also is a clickable group photo from 1997 on the Baker lab website. So perhaps something like these, maybe more recent versions, might also be placed on the Rosetta@home website ?

PS: I liked the photos from the hiking trips - the similarity of the mountains to the Alps south of Munich, Germany, where I live, is quite amazing.

Well that certainly phattened the thread didn't it. :( :( :(

So, "Rosetta, fighting disease by solving the protein jig-saw!" and a jigsaw graphic.

Seti has more crunchers because it has been around longest. I have been a member of Seti since 7/1999. Many of the people that crunch Seti are "fire and forget" types who never look at it, they just see it running.

When Berkeley switch "classic" off for good, all of these people will be dragged screaming into the BOINC age. Having a good marketting approach, easy website, friendly and regular communications with the project staff etc. will all make Rosetta more attractive to the nouveau BOINCer.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Sorry, too late to edit, but Seti classic is supposed to be closing finally 15/12/2005.

Be prepared.

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November 15, 2005
On December 15, 2005, after 6 years of operation, this project will shut down. But SETI@home is not going away. We're alive and well and running on the BOINC distributed computing platform. It's easy to switch over - just follow the instructions on the new SETI@home web site. We hope to see everyone there!
At the time of shutdown, the stats for this project will be frozen but will continue to be available on the web.
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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

I dont see too many classic users coming over at all within the first few months of classic shutting down, they will all be sulking with BOINC and having a cry about it.

Will be some time I reackon until they adventure out of the creche!!

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Join us in Chat (see the forum) Click the Sig


Join UBT

Re: SETI Classic. I don't know who is joining, but today there were 649 new users of SETI according to the current BOINC stats.

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My apologies if I squandered too many kBytes (37 kB to be precise) on DB's image. There is an option in the forum preferences to show all images as links. ;-)

It was not you 30k 400 pixel image that phattened the thread, it was the 220k 1200+ pixel wide one. Horizontal scrolling, no thanks!

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

I am all about flash, I would like to see some flash on the site. Or maybe just jazzed up a little.

Apart from the everyday forums of user asking questions about the project or what the WU names mean (ie; myself), a nice explaination of the terms would be great. Does anyone remember old seti classic pages how they had that there? I would like to see that but definetly not as cumbersome to navigate as setis was.

Also what if the rosetta team got together and made a page of themselves, meet the team per say. Their own personal page of who they are their goals, what their hopes are for the project, hell even a "we tried to implement this idea today and it totally flopped on us and we are ticked off!", Why not you guys get to hear about our frustrations. Could be fun. again, only ideas.

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I am all about flash, I would like to see some flash on the site.

Use Flash if there's a need for it (e.g. to demonstrate how proteins fold) but please don't invent reasons to use it. I come to this site for information, not entertainment. No need for gimmicks.

If you do use Flash, please make the page(s) that use it accessible without it too. Flash is fun for some. It's an annoying waste of time and bandwidth for others (and inaccessible without plug-in).

The "meet the team" page does sound like a nice idea though.

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*** Join BOINC@Australia today ***

It's an annoying waste of time and bandwidth for others (and inaccessible without plug-in).

Absolutely. Flash for the sake of flash is pointless and extremely annoying. Only use flash if its the best technology for the intended purpose.

Personally, I quite like the site - the forums work, are linked to the profile and overall the site stays 'low cal' and snappy.

The only things I would like to see added are:
1) pix of the founders, the team and the lab.
2) a 'rosetta for the masses' page describing folding in layman term (could lift this of some very good threads that have been raised in the forums.
3) in the forums, a way to know which one of the thread I'm participating has been updated.

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Team CFVault.com
http://www.cfvault.com

for point 3 you could ask the lattice boinc admins (http://lattice.umiacs.umd.edu/boinc_public/),
they have it in their boinc forums: (# unread messages)

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added linebreak for better reading

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Florian
www.domplatz1.de

I agree, an over flashed site is horrible and can even give the broadband users a wait. When done right flash can look great. Yet I agree, less is more. But I personally like things to look flashy, an eye grabber can't do no harm when done right.

for instance, these site have flash done in a way that is annoying, (my opinon)
http://www.kpf.com/
http://www.mad-pixel.com/
http://www.nsm.com.ar/index.shtml
http://www.mjau-mjau.com/classic.html

yet these flash site sites are rather done nice, (my opinon)
http://www.digitalscience.za.org/flashindex.htm
http://www.2advanced.com/flashindex.htm
http://www.aperfectcircle.com/

When done right and done nicely, it can make for a great experiance.

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The following is a post that was made by Michiel Jorissen, for which I modified by replacing the image with a link (see link below). The image was a bit too wide so I removed the original post. The work put into the post is very much appreciated.

The changes you've made already are quite good, thanks for that. Here are some (bigger) changes you could make.

Of course you want your website to stand out against other Boinc-related projects, so you could try to make it look different. If you look at the websites of Predictor@home, LHC@home and Einstein@home, you can see they look almost exactly the same. However, Climateprediction.net and World community grid have a totally different website. They offer the same features, but in a different package.

I'd make the Rosetta@home and University of Washington logo about the same size. Both taking 50% of the entire width of the website. The text that's currently in that place could be much, much shorter and can be placed below those two logos full width, next to the search box.

The green 'boxes' around the text on the main site are in my opinion the wrong colour. I'd use the logo's red or blue colour for those. The Rosetta logo is red/blue and the Washington logo is blue, so that's the one I'd take throughout the entire website.

Edit: I've photoshopped an example of what I mean. I'm not a professional at this, but you'll get my point:

click here to see the image example

I agree, an over flashed site is horrible and can even give the broadband users a wait. When done right flash can look great. Yet I agree, less is more. But I personally like things to look flashy, an eye grabber can't do no harm when done right.

...

When done right and done nicely, it can make for a great experiance.

I agree... but also somthing - flash is brilliant at creating fully descriptive presentations. You could create one to visually describe in detail what Rosetta @home does, what Protein folding really means, and how (in detail) BOINC and DC in general works.

I saw a great application like this whilst I was looking at World Community Grid, they have one, but it is targeted mainly at kids and DC in general, not adults or Rosetta.

It would be a really useful tool, if just to help my work colleges and people who dont know what "CPU" means, dont know what you are talking about when you say "system resources, Hard-drive, RAM, solid-state, BIOS etc".

Heres a couple of urls for you:

World Community Grid

and

Try Science's DC presentation

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I thought a bit about the order in which the links appear on the home page and these are the suggested changes I came up with:

1) move the item "Server status" from the "About" to the "Returning participants" section - this is only of interest if one already runs Rosetta (i.e., for returning participants).

2) place "BOINCWiki" immediately under "Download BOINC" in the "Join Rosetta@home" section - it seems to make sense to group the BOINC specific items together.

3) make the "Welcome from David Baker" the first item in the "About" section - this section would then contain all the links giving backgournd information about the project and science; "Join Rosetta@home" would group together the more technical, BOINC related items.

4) move the "About" section to the top, followed by the "Join Rosetta@home" section - a first time visitor will first read the intro at the top and than want more detailed info on the project to make up her mind whether Rosetta is for her. The items in the "About" section beginning with the "Welcome by DB", containing such information, would then be the first thing one sees after reading the intro. After she has made up her mind to join Rosetta, she will want to know about the technical details on how to sign up etc., explained in the "Join Rosetta@home" section, following immediately underneath.

Some of the additional info proposed in this thread, like the team member pics and protein/gene basics ('Rosetta for the masses') could eventually also go into the "About" section". As to including a group photo, maybe the one from the "Trip to Discovery Park (2005)" from the Baker lab website would be suitable (only the names are missing) ?

I hope this helps. Must be frustrating, Devid (K), to read about all those whishes and suggestions to change the web page on which I am sure you spent quite some thought and effort (the result of which was already quite good to begin with :-).

Must be frustrating, Devid (K), to read about all those whishes and suggestions to change the web page on which I am sure you spent quite some thought and effort (the result of which was already quite good to begin with :-).

Not at all. I like everyone's input. I've already implemented some great suggestions. Keep them coming!

The web page design was thrown together very quickly (as you probably have already noticed, it is not unlike other boinc projects). The content which trumps design for this type of site in my opinion, however, does take time to develop (imagine the time it would take to do a flash segment as some are suggesting), but with time, my hope is that the site will mature with lots of great information and feedback.

Speaking of flash, any flash gurus out there want to donate their time to develop a "Rosetta@home intro/info" flash segment?

Speaking of flash, any flash gurus out there want to donate their time to develop a "Rosetta@home intro/info" flash segment?

Personally I never install Flash on any of my machines. Because it is reponsible for all the annoying pup-ups and flying windows with ads that scream for your attention. Not to mention the countless home pages with a 'Skip Intro' command. I only install it if it is necessary to view a certain website I really need to see. And after I uninstall it again. Ah well, that's me ;-)

Content is much more important than showing off tech skills. An appealing combination of style and graphics contributes much more to a pleasant user experience.

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BOINC.BE: For Belgians who love the smell of glowing red cpu's in the morning
Tutta55's Lair

David, here is a cliche idea, To spark interest in rosetta@home.

Ok, think of the matrix code running down the screen but its amino acid sequences instead, there is some kind of hynototic moby sounding music playing. All seams preety cliche but then screen starts changing and music is more intense, The acid sequnece starts increasing speed and starts morping into a protein. It shows the protein develop and then anouther protein pops up and more and more. Next we fade into a sceen from baker labs and we see you guys doing stuff with test tubes and lab rats and then it fades into some kid taking a pill. It ends with a powerful message supporting the rosetta@home project.

It could be done in flash or anouther medium. I am sure there is room for that contest idea I had earlier for something like that.

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