Where is the robot girl? Will you make enough money from "skyscraper" banners?

I like the darker blue and the curved edges look cool.

Definitely prefer the new version.  The darker color makes all the difference.  I'm assuming the robot girl was gone simply because Simon was logged in for the screen shot and that it will appear when you are not signed in as it does now.

I think it would be nice if the main news column be broken up by some inset pictures. Nearly each story could lead with a picture, graph or something visual. This would break up the text density a bit and draw the new visitor's interest.

Since the member blogs will be moved over to a side column, they shouldn't display any pictures until the vistor decides to load one of the entries. If members have put pictures in their entries, vistors can then see them but they won't be visible on the root page.

This gives you and george some control over what visual content is on the root page and prevents spammers from putting something inappropriate there.

The picture per-news-item idea is a good one, but make sure that it isn't set up like the last time we tried this where if there was no picture a default placeholder image showed up.

I agree with the others, I think it's for the better, and hopefully you can make a bit of revenue from the ads. Reminds me of what I missed in the old BH layout. And it's so clean, and at least to me, welcoming.

Very nice.

I definitely like the change to the darker blue in the header.  

The only thing that might stand out as being able to stand a wee bit of refinement is the presence of the large square graphics next to the news items showing the views and comments.  To me, the font used for showing the number of comments just seems rather large, and though it is nice to be able to see immediately how many comments a given item has, it might look better if this were a bit more subtle, so as not to be "competing" with the actual news headline.

But, that's just my opinion.

Simon,

You said you want to centralize transhumanist-themed news articles... and this made me think about Ken Gumbs, creator of the documentary "Building Gods."

On the wta-campus yahoo group, I heard he is working on creating a central hub website that will link to transhumanist-themed videos hosted by Google.

I think if you could collaborate with him and merge this idea into BetterHumans it might make this website a lot bigger and more interesting.  You are already working on a major overhaul anyways.  Just a thought.

First thought: very Slashdotty (slashdot.org).

That aside, I feel that dropping the robot girl -- at least in that view -- is a good thing. The site looks extremely professional and clean: it just asks to be read.

To be honest, I'm not so sure I like the tabs with the comment/views info on the left hand side. Maybe the right? Also, have you thought about adding a bit more information, such as categories?

Regarding ads, you may want to consider putting the Search box inline with the page-list and putting a banner (or half-banner) there, now that you have the horizontal space to work with. (This integrates better into the page than a big banner accross the top which pushes all your articles down.)

Finally, do you plan to do something with the empty space just below the ad? It just looks sooo lonely... (polls? category list? partners, instead of along the bottom? user control pannel? recommended books? community calendar (which displays various conferences and meetings accross the continent/world)? featurettes from what Ken Gumbs is putting together?

All in all, I love the look. Very sophisticated. Very clean.