The World Transhumanist Association (WTA) website is a comprehensive site for information about transhumanism. That is the good news. The bad news is that the web site design is dated. Web 1.0 dated. The great news: after a successful fundraising event, the WTA is undergoing a branding and website redesign.

Design

With a four-column format that makes some use of tables for layout (!!!), the WTA site is nothing if not cluttered. The color design is fairly uniform but the salmon, orange, and light blue header color scheme may not have been the best of choices, especially considering that none of these colors appear in the WTA logo.

Of the WTA logo, let us just say that the rebranding and redesign will be very helpful.

Web 1.0 design packed information onto a website by using small text and cluttered lists of links to additional pages. There was lots of scrolling, or there was lots of clicking links. The WTA website is firmly a product of the early 2000s. The index page is a list of headlines and links. Following resource links often leads to more lists of links. What you will not find are many images or graphics.

The first aesthetic differences in Web 2.0 design were readily apparent: easier to read and larger text, horizontal blocking of content, increased use of (large) graphics and icons, and an almost storyteller-like flow of information. Fortunately, the "WTA $25,000 Matching Grant" page is a hint of what is to come, and a refreshing example of the best of Web 2.0 design. It is telling that the very page devoted to raising funds for the identity and website update is a very good model for that update. I doubt that the fundraising would have been nearly as successful had the page looked like the rest of the website.

Every social movement has had its aesthetic sensibilities reflected in propaganda, flyers, artwork, music, etc. Because of the very nature of the transhumanist movement, including the prominent status of technology at its core, it must embrace the latest in web technologies in addition to creating its own artistic language. To date, the transhumanism movement has failed to do so, and this is reflected in the current WTA website.

With Web 3.0 (my definition: semantic web, sensor web, mashups of databases, machine automation, websites as software applications, the use of depth in design, and the emphasized use of graphics, audio, video, and multimedia instead of text) upon us, the transhumanist movement must leap over Web 2.0 if it is to become relevant. A single page hints that the WTA is ready to make this leap, if only by demonstrating a quick mastery of Web 2.0 design techniques.

Content

An official website devoted to a social movement like transhumanism should have a wealth of information not only for those who identify with the movement, but for those who are learning about it for the first time. The WTA website gets high marks for containing lots of information, with much of that content also available in other languages. Information is helpfully categorized in the left sidebar under "To Do", "To Read", and "Lingua" topics. This does not quite match the options in the primary navigation bar across the main center devision, and this highlights the clutter of the site. The wealth of information is difficult to parse, for new and old visitors alike.

News and events are kept up to date, but via more lists of links. It is not clear how "News from the Edge" and "Recent H+ News" are different, why the "Transhumanity Blog" is lost at the bottom of one of the columns, or how any of these relate to the WTA.

It is easy to critique a website that is clearly not an example of modern web practices. This is a failing of the WTA, but one they hope to rectify with their new identity and website update. I will review the updated website as soon as it becomes available.