I can remember noticing inadequacies in the old website, but am having trouble remembering precisely what they were. One, however, was that it was not properly maintained. For example, many people must have gone to the website to find the latest news about the LMS/IMA merger. If they did, they would often have found pages that had not been updated for months. Are there plans to remedy this, or are people secretly hoping that the site will magically update itself? (I’m sure the answer is the former, but I thought I’d at least check.)
Looking to the future, I imagine that a high proportion of people who visit the LMS website do so to obtain information about the LMS journals. I have memories of this being somewhat inconvenient. I remember reading online somewhere an excellent article about web design, which said that a golden rule is not to force your readers to click too many times. I can’t yet find an example where that rule is violated — I’ll keep searching.
I do see that on the journals main page it is not easy to find a link to the LMS main home page. (It exists, but it is, rather weirdly, the penultimate in a list of links at the top of the page and doesn’t stand out. I’m sure the new website will have a sensible design in this respect — it should *always* be easy to get back to the main page.)
Ah — I’ve found something that’s a bit what I was talking about. If you go to the main home page in search of information about submitting a paper to the LMS, it takes a while before you realize that you are interested in the link entitled “Publications”, and then you have to follow another (not very prominent) link to “Journals”. Perhaps then you realize that you should have clicked on “Paper submissions”. It’s all fine if you’ve used it recently ten times already — not if you are using it for the first time for a while.
In general, the list of links on the front page is oddly arbitrary. One would expect the links down the left-hand side to be more prominent.
I’ll stop here, since most of what I am saying is glaringly obvious.
[converted from a comment]
