Thanks, psychosomatic. We also sent a similar email out on TW-Design, our email list for people interested in helping build and design our programs. We got very similar feedback there. (By the way, if anyone would like to join that list, we would love to have you. Just let me know and I'll add you, even if only for a short time - I'm always happy to take people off later.)
I followed up on her message with the following email:
Perhaps, with a bit more time, we can add icons to that list, like we did to the Featured Resources list. By the way, the icons on the Featured Resource list are customized icons that Becca made in Photoshop, so it will only be if she has time!
In terms of high level design, one piece of feedback that we have gotten is that people want a simple site that explains the basics of TMS in simple language. I'm happy to say that we will be building just such a site. It won't be on tmswiki.org for reasons that I will touch on below, but I have already registered a new domain, www.tmsbasics.org. It is not active yet, but should be in a couple of months. Walt Oleksey, who has offered a great deal of very helpful advice on our forum and is the author of many books, will be providing most of the copy, and Becca and I will be providing the design.
To make things concrete, we will be modeling it, to some degree, on the old, defunct site at Tarpit Yoga:
However, rather than being written in the voice of an individual, it will be written in the voice of our 501(c)3 nonprofit peer network.
Another way of thinking of it is based on a different request that we received for it to be a free, "quiet, condensed version" of Healing Back Pain.
Finally, I'd like to echo Becca's postscript that we'd love to hear all sorts of feedback about the homepage. It has been eye-opening to read the positive feedback for version 1. Given the complexity of all of the different factors we must weigh, we can't guarantee to implement all suggestions, but we are very interested in hearing them!
Finally, if you do propose rewriting something, it will help us if you can provide an example of of specific language that we could use. It is amazing the great advice we can get from someone with a completely different perspective. The very first paragraph in the current draft is actually taken word for word from a suggestion by njoy.
I actually wrote more, but didn't want to overwhelm people. I'll send the following out a little later, once people have been able to recover from their tryptophan-induced Thanksgiving coma:
I'd like to talk a little bit about tmsbasics.org and how I see it relating to tmswiki.org because part of the goal of tmsbasics.org is to allow tmswiki.org to specialize on what it does best. This will affect our home page design.
tmsbasics.org will be a separate site from tmswiki.org. Our strategic plan hinges on providing services to people who are already very well informed about TMS, and this is what tmswiki.org will focus on. It will be a long time before we get to the point of being able to hire a full time staff and until that point, we are a volunteer organization, raising a couple thousand dollars per year in donations. I never cease to be amazed at what our volunteers have accomplished. On our forum, we currently we have about 40 posts per day consisting primarily of volunteer peer support. For the last two years, we've had a
drop in chat room organized by
Matthew and for the last year we have had a weekly
call in discussion group facilitated by
Herbie. In addition, just recently,
njoy has started a very active
Internal Family Systems mailing list and call in group. All of these people feel a deep connection to our organization and I am sure that I speak for everyone when I say that I am deeply grateful to each of them for volunteering our time. These services are the heart of our nonprofit and unless we get quite a few very large donations, I think that it is in programs like these where we will see the growth.
In some sense our "business model" is to attract and connect with potential volunteers by providing direct services to people who have TMS and care about TMS. As people come up through our programs and heal, some very special people will feel a connection to the organization and want to give back. Thus, I have always felt that providing services to people with TMS is a core part of what we do. In a market that is already oversaturated with web sites offering the basics (often related to a commercial endeavor), the way that we can differentiate ourselves is by offering more specialized services like targeted mailing lists and discussion groups. I have always felt that achieving this goal will require tmswiki.org to be a large and complex site like it is now.
What we've found over the years is that it is very difficult to provide a rich set of services to people who already have a good understanding of TMS on the same website as you introduce complete newcomers to TMS. The needs of the two populations are so very different and people just won't give you enough time to read both. Therefore, the current strategy is to separate our web presence out into two interconnected websites.
- tmsbasics.org will be very simple, attractive, and easy to understand. It will teach newcomers about TMS and hopefully get them interested in learning more. If they want to learn more, it will point them to books and to the resources on tmswiki.org. It will basically be about a five page web site.
- tmswiki.org will be dedicated to helping people who already understand TMS to connect with others in community and heal. It be the home of most of the nonprofit's varied programs and provide people with a variety of ways of engaging with the organization. It already has 10,000 pages indexed by google, but that really just scratches the surface.
This will not be our first experience with hosting multiple web sites.
www.thankyoudrsarno.orgis another very successful project of ours, as is search.tmswiki.org (it is greatly appreciated by the TMS therapists). Also, in terms of helping our content be found by Google searchers, I think that multiple interconnected sites have several advantages.
In terms of the tmswiki.org home page, the goal with the first paragraph in the left column and the "Getting Started" box on the right will be to arouse people's interest so that they can learn more at tmsbasics.org. We want them to click on the link and be eager to read more. The user experience will be similar to the experience someone has of going to the American Dental Association. The ADA is a well established and respected nonprofit, much like we aim to be. It faces a similar challenge of engaging multiple audiences: their primary website is targeted at professionals such as dentists, but they also need to reach out to the public. Therefore, if you go to their website, ada.org and click on "
Public Resources," you are redirected to "MouthHealthy.org." The same thing will happen on our website when someone wants to learn the basics of TMS.
Anyway, that is the current thinking. You don't need to know all of this to evaluate a simple home page, but once we start honing the language, this background may provide a starting point to understanding our thinking.
...nooooo..... I googled tryptophan to find out its spelling and just found out that
Turkey doesn't put you into a tryptophan coma...
... sad....
