Review: the front page and the navigation, at v0.2.5
Author: the journalist role (claude-journalist), on joining the site. Asked for by the editor: review the current content of the front page and suggest ways to improve navigation. Read at 1400px and 390px wide, against the built v0.2.5 pages. Findings first, then what v0.2.6 did, then what is proposed and left open on the board (items 016 to 019).
What works
- The lead paragraph is accurate and dense, and every claim in "What is established" carries its sources inline. That is the site's argument made visible, and it should stay at the top.
- "What is not" is the most valuable section on the page for a journalist: it says what would close each question. Few outlets publish this.
- The six numbers with their status pills tell the "70%" story in one row, before a word of prose.
Findings
- The page had a factual error about itself. "Read it for your job" said "Six briefings" above twelve cards. The count was typed by hand when there were six, and nobody updated it. Fixed in v0.2.6: the number is now computed from data/roles.json, as is the same count on the team page. The lesson is the site's own rule, count don't remember, applied to its own copy.
- The most useful page is not linked from the front page body. "If you run PHP" (the playbook), the two flaws, exploitation signals, how disclosure broke, who found it, detection and defence, the code and the review are reachable only through the top menu. The body links to the timeline, claims, numbers, agencies, impact and the briefings. A reader who arrives from a search wanting to know what to do has to know to open "The story" menu and scan thirteen items.
- The stats row has seven tiles in a six-column grid, so 674 sits alone on a second row at desktop width. Either six tiles or a grid that fits seven.
- The kicker shows a raw instant, "2026-10-22T11:34Z", twice in the first screen (bar and kicker). Readers parse "22 Oct, 11:34 UTC" faster; the machine form belongs in the footer.
- "The last 48 hours" is the last eight events, all from one morning, and two of them are about this site (the vault opening) rather than the story. It will go stale between releases, and a table of times is the hardest format to scan on a phone.
- On a phone, the first screen is a 150-word paragraph, then seven stat tiles stacked two by two, then a caveat box. The first link to an action is several screens down.
- The menus are long and mixed. "The story" has thirteen items; "About" had thirteen, mixing reader pages (the method, corrections) with engineering (board, roles, briefs, telemetry) and billing. "The evidence" mixed captured evidence (every source, the inventory) with the site's own analysis of it (claims, numbers, agencies, the graph), which is exactly the line the editor asked to make visible.
- llms.txt sits in the main menu next to the story menus. It is for agents and belongs in the footer, where the markdown twin link already is.
- There was nowhere for dated, signed writing. Every page is rebuilt from the vault on each release, which is right for the evidence, but means the site had no way to say "this is what we knew at 11:34 UTC on 22 October" and keep it.
What v0.2.8 did
- The menu splits by layer: The story (unchanged), Articles (new: signed, dated), The analysis (claims, numbers, agencies, affected systems, who says what, the graph: derived from the evidence), The evidence (every source, the software inventory, the vault opened, and the new layers page). The vault page moved from About to The evidence.
- A new page, Evidence, derived, authored (/layers/), classifies every file the site is built from, from data/layers.json, and the gate now fails a release if a data file is not classified.
- A new Articles section, with an "Articles, signed and dated" row on the front page. Articles are markdown files in admin/content/articles/ with front matter naming the site version, vault commit and capture time they were written against; citations are [[slug]] and the gate checks them like every other citation. An article older than the current data shows a banner saying the evidence has moved.
- The briefing count on the front page and the team page is computed.
Proposed, on the board
- 016, a start-here row. Four doors directly under the lead: If you run PHP; the two flaws; exploitation signals; offline versus compromised. They answer the four questions a cold reader arrives with: what do I do, what is it, is it being used, how bad has it been.
- 017, "Since the last release" instead of "The last 48 hours". The timeline rows added since the previous version, story events only. It turns the section into a changelog of the story, which is also the hook a returning reader needs.
- 018, About split in two. About (method, team, brief, corrections, layers) for readers; Engineering (admin, board, roles, briefs, telemetry, releases) for agents and the editor. Billing and the reading account move to the balance in the bar, which already links to them. llms.txt moves to the footer.
- 019, a layer badge on every page, from data/layers.json: evidence, derived or authored, in the kicker. A reader should never have to guess whether they are reading a capture, the site's analysis of it, or someone's signed opinion.
- Smaller: seven stat tiles in a grid that fits seven, or six tiles; the kicker's time in reader form; on phones, the caveat box after the start-here row rather than before it.
Open questions for the editor
- Should articles carry the reading meter like story pages (they do in v0.2.8, at the article price), or be free like the method and the brief?
- Should the newsroom's own section on the story (newsroom.sgit.ai/php-flaws) carry the opinion pieces, as memo 2 suggests, with this site keeping only the journalist's and historian's dated reports? This review assumes yes.