Site Blog

Revamped Home Page

Today I revamped the home page to reflect the new organization of the site. The three main categories of information on the site are:

1. Conditions
2. Experiences
3. Organization

Conditions is what we were calling the "Book" in earlier versions of the site. The idea of the book was always to draw from Recipes and Testimonies, to generate a collection of organized and useful pages for transforming mind and body. More thinking on this led us to re-envision this "Book of Wisdom" as a "Book of Conditions".

The reason for this shift is that present-day America tends to approach health from the point of view of conditions (aka symptoms) -- as opposed to causation, prevention, and healthy practices. So this site should reflect the mindset of present-day America -- at least as the site greets a new user.

Experiences are the guts of the site: Recipes, Testimonies, and Questions. All three kinds of content comprise the personal experiences of we Holonation members. 

These collective experiences reflect what is radical about this site. Most health sites that start with a condition like "cancer" or "autism" would go directlty to "expert" organizations like the Mayo Clinic, and/or to the pharmaceutical companies who offer "magic pills".

Of course, "natural health" sites don't cite the Mayo Clinic first or the phameceuticals either. But what those sites tend to do is reply upon the expertise of one or a few natural health practitioners.

Holonation "takes a left turn at Albuquerque" and relies instead upon the collective experience of the members. This collective experience produces the Wisdom of the Crowds effect.

Organizaton is the principal means through which that wisdom is "mined".  The three main organizational approaches on the site are Our Values, Tags, and Members. (Of course, Ratings also helps in this regard.)

"Our Values" is what we formerly called "categories", and more recently, "Mind & Body functions". This new name gets us closer to the heart of this site than did the previous names. For example, "Functions" like Love and Wisdom are not merely functions of the human mind, they are also how we value experiences like Recipes. But they are even more than that. They are our values.

At bottom, Our Values are simply a special case of tags. That is, they are those specific tags that reflect our values. But because they do, they are treated specially.

Finally, it may seem strange to call Members a "means of organization". Of course, we members of Holonation are the source of almost every item of information on the site. So the Members are obviously much more than merely one kind of organizing tool.

However, when we click on the page for a particular member, what we get is a particular slice through the content of the site (specifically, we are seeing the content authored by that member). This is quite analogous to visting the page of one of our values or of a tag.

Well, at the end of the day, I hope this new re-oganization helps improve the site's usefulness.