Here is Sonnet analyzing user experience and information architecture, also incorporating my notes. This is a partial list, not comprehensive.
IANDS possesses extraordinary content and a vital mission, but its digital presence fails to deliver on this potential. Three critical problems require immediate attention:
Fragmented Architecture: Content scattered across multiple subdomains (conference.iands.org, symposium.iands.org, isgo.iands.org) splits our authority and confuses visitors who can't find what they need.
Trapped Content: Poor information design and gated/paywalled content create a strong barrier between us and our target audience. For example, hundreds of PDFs exist without corresponding web pages, making valuable research invisible to search engines. Unique and invaluable research papers are also fragmented in presentation and force users to leave the IANDS ecosystem entirely. These are just two examples of the many content issues on the site.
Technical Failures: Browser bugs publicly displayed on our site, duplicate content across thousands of pages, and a 5-level deep navigation system create frustration that drives visitors away.
The Opportunity: A strategic consolidation would transform IANDS into the undisputed digital authority for near-death experiences. While competitors focus on single aspects—UVA on academic research, NDERF on story collection, ACISTE on professional support—only IANDS bridges all three domains. Our fragmented architecture prevents this unique value from being recognized.
IANDS has served as the pioneering authority on near-death experiences since 1981, publishing the only peer-reviewed journal in the field, supporting 50+ local groups, and hosting premier conferences. Yet our digital presence actively undermines this mission through structural decisions that fragment rather than unite.
The current ecosystem isn't a website—it's a collection of disconnected sites. A visitor encountering conference.iands.org may never realize it's part of the larger IANDS organization. This architectural chaos dilutes our brand recognition and cedes digital authority to competitors who present unified, professional platforms.
Our organization has created an enormous library of valuable content that remains largely inaccessible:
Format Silos: Hundreds of PDFs containing research, guides, and educational materials exist without corresponding web pages. Search engines cannot index PDF content effectively, meaning this valuable information is essentially invisible online. Each PDF should have a companion web page with properly formatted, searchable text.
Magazine Content Isolation: Vital Signs, our quarterly magazine containing valuable information and context about NDEs, remains largely unavailable to website visitors. The magazine content isn't replicated as web pages—a best practice in modern information architecture. Leading organizations publish magazine content both as downloadable PDFs and as searchable web articles, maximizing reach and SEO value. Currently, years of valuable Vital Signs content remains trapped in PDF format, inaccessible to search engines and difficult for visitors to discover.
Research Fragmentation: The Journal of Near-Death Studies—our crown jewel—requires users to navigate away from IANDS.org to access papers. Research articles are buried 3-4 clicks deep with no clear organization by topic or author. Some links are deliberately broken (like https://doi.org/10.17514/JNDS-2024-42-3-pxxx-xxx), resulting in ‘page not found’ errors. These PDFs could easily be transferred, indexed and made searchable within the site, keeping visitors engaged longer—a strong SEO trust and authority signal for Google.
The digital infrastructure violates every principle of effective web design:
Subdomain Proliferation: Each subdomain (conference.iands.org, symposium.iands.org, etc.) operates as an independent site with its own navigation, about pages, and user experience. Consolidating these into folders (iands.org/conference, iands.org/symposium) would immediately multiply our SEO authority by concentrating all backlinks and content value under one powerful domain—a change that typically boosts search rankings by 20-30%.
Navigation Nightmare: The menu system spans 5 levels deep with hundreds of options, overwhelming visitors with choices. Simplifying to a 2-3 level structure with clear categories would dramatically improve user engagement and reduce bounce rates—changes that Google rewards with higher rankings.
Broken User Journeys: The symposium.iands.org site requires users to click "Main IANDS Website" to return to the primary domain—a clear indication that these should be integrated, not separate. Multiple "About IANDS" pages across different subdomains create confusion about which information is current and authoritative.
Nothing erodes trust faster than visible technical problems:
Browser Incompatibility Warnings: Our conference site displays public messages that the VOD page "doesn't work with iPhone Safari browser" and login fails with Microsoft Edge. These warnings, along with promises to "wait a couple of days for us to fix this issue," communicate amateur management.
Mobile Experience Failure: With 60% of web traffic from mobile devices and Google using mobile-first indexing, our iPhone Safari bug blocks a massive portion of potential visitors. This isn't just a technical issue—it's a fundamental barrier to reaching our audience.
The same content appears across multiple URLs throughout our sites, creating severe SEO problems:
Authority Dilution: When identical content exists on conference.iands.org and iands.org, search engines don't know which to rank. Implementing canonical tags and 301 redirects would instantly consolidate this scattered authority into concentrated ranking power, likely moving us up 2-3 positions for key search terms.
Crawl Budget Waste: Search engines allocate limited resources to crawling our site. They're currently indexing thousands of duplicate pages instead of our unique content. Eliminating duplicates would redirect Google's attention to our valuable research and resources, improving indexation of pages that actually matter for our mission.
Fragmented Updates: Different teams updating various subdomains leads to inconsistent information, outdated content in multiple locations, and confusion about which source is authoritative.
The practice of uploading PDFs without web page equivalents creates multiple issues:
Search Invisibility: Google cannot effectively index PDF content. Converting these to web pages would instantly make years of valuable research discoverable, potentially adding hundreds of entry points from search engines and establishing IANDS as the go-to source for NDE research.
Poor User Experience: PDFs require downloads and don't work well on mobile devices. Web-native content loads instantly, is shareable with one click, and keeps visitors engaged within our ecosystem—exactly the user behavior that builds domain authority.
Lost Linking Opportunities: Web pages can build internal link networks that boost SEO. Converting PDFs to web pages would create a powerful interconnected knowledge base, with each page reinforcing the authority of related content.
The site's technical performance falls far below acceptable standards:
Page Speed Crisis: Load times that should be under 2.5 seconds stretch much longer, causing visitors to abandon before pages fully load.
Visual Instability: Content shifts as pages load, causing users to click wrong links or lose their reading position—extremely frustrating on mobile devices.
Poor Interactivity: Delays between user actions and site responses make the experience feel broken and untrustworthy.
The current site wasn't built with mobile-first design principles, yet mobile optimization represents the fastest path to improved rankings:
Responsive Design Implementation: Adapting content to automatically fit any screen size would immediately improve user experience for the 60% of visitors on mobile devices—a change Google rewards with significant ranking boosts.
Touch Optimization: Properly sized links and buttons for mobile interaction would reduce frustration and increase engagement, sending positive user signals to search engines.
Image Optimization: Implementing responsive images that load appropriate sizes for each device would cut page load times by 50% or more, directly improving both user experience and search rankings.
The competitors have chosen focused strategies that highlight IANDS's unique opportunity:
UVA Division of Perceptual Studies: Leverages academic prestige with a clean, unified site under Virginia.edu. Their limitation: purely academic focus with limited community engagement.
NDERF: Dominates with 5,300+ personal stories on a single, searchable platform. Their limitation: lacks academic rigor and professional resources.
ACISTE: Provides professional integration support through a streamlined directory. Their limitation: narrow focus on post-experience integration only.
Also competing: Noetic.org and MonroeInstitute.org have built modern, unified platforms that effectively serve their communities.
IANDS is the only organization attempting to bridge academic research, personal experiences, and professional support. But the fragmented architecture makes this comprehensive value invisible. Consolidation would immediately establish IANDS as the central hub for everything NDE-related.
Unify All Subdomains: Move conference.iands.org → iands.org/conference, symposium.iands.org → iands.org/symposium, etc. This concentrates all SEO value under one powerful domain.
Implement Proper Redirects: Use 301 redirects to preserve existing links and transfer authority to the new structure.
Convert PDFs to Web Pages: Create a companion web page for every PDF, with properly formatted, searchable text. Keep PDFs as downloadable resources but make content web-native.
Centralize Research Access: Bring all journal articles and research papers into the IANDS ecosystem with consistent presentation and navigation that keeps users on our site.
Fix Browser Compatibility: Eliminate all browser-specific bugs immediately. Our site must work flawlessly on every browser and device.
Simplify Navigation: Reduce menu depth to 2-3 levels maximum with clear, logical categorization.
Optimize Performance: Compress images, minimize code, implement caching, and achieve Core Web Vitals scores above 90.
Given the depth of current issues, incremental fixes won't suffice. A complete migration to a modern platform like Webflow would:
Eliminate all technical debt at once
Provide built-in mobile responsiveness
Include automatic SEO optimization
Enable no-code content management
Reduce ongoing maintenance costs
When a qualified technical lead manages the migration, developers typically cost $1,500-$3,000 for a project of this scope—these are internal contractor costs, not retail prices. This investment would deliver far more value than the cost.
IANDS stands at a digital crossroads. Our valuable content and vital mission are trapped within a failing technical infrastructure that prevents us from serving our community effectively. The current fragmentation across subdomains, confusing navigation experience, and profound technical failures don't just limit growth—they actively undermine our authority in a field we pioneered.
The investment required is modest compared to the return: restored search rankings, dramatically improved user engagement, and a sustainable platform that properly serves our mission. Increased visibility and awareness lead directly to increased donations and membership growth. Most importantly, it would ensure that people searching for understanding about near-death experiences find IANDS first—exactly as it should be.
We're prepared to support this transformation, in whatever way is most helpful!