Well done to MWP...

[RB]

...in the news again! (Times).

What saddens me is that notwithstanding the exposure and constant mention of mwp.com one would expect a deluge of new members and posting on the forum, but this is not the case. Is it because people are not interested?

But maybe there is another reason. Now considering that the forum is the "life" of a website and is such a valuable part of it, maybe there is not enough prominence in the site navigation i.e. from pages such as the main page - the only navigation to the forum is a link under the heading "General Links" - unfortunately a heading like that to most internet users would mean that the subsections to be found are of little interest. "General" in itself is such a meaningless term that it immediately relegates itself into the "last resort" section of the subconscious.

Internet users tend to want to get straight to the point and don't just "browse"- that was in the old, old days of the Internet when the existence of a website was something of wonder - today there is so much information available online that one has to be very selective and it is important for websites to have all the important stuff very clearly marked and immediately accessible, not hidden.

I think that if this were the case, the forum could be very busy indeed.

One other suggestion I have is to remove the Java applet on the homepage and all other usage of Java on the site, users with XP just can't see a thing - it just looks like a missing image, it unforunately gives a poor first impression of the site which is not merited.

RB