The main change in this update is the addition of the first draft of a true home page for the site. Essentially, the new page serves to provide an outline of the chief functionality of the site in the format of interactive demonstrations. The key functionality verbs are "Explore" - demonstrating the ability to view and interact with the chemical structure of various organic molecules in the molecule editing tool, "Innovate/Solve" - demonstrating the ability of the pathway generator utility to find a molecular pathway between two organic molecules given optimization preferences, "Review/Deliver" - demonstrating the ability of the site to review, annotate, and approve or disapprove of proposed pathways, and "Discover" - a yet to be designed feature of the site to encourage exploration of hypothetical products of molecules in certain reactions.
In addition to serving as a demonstration of the chief functionality of the site, the page also serves to provide an overall snapshot of the current status and order of the site. As such, I expect the page to evolve as the rest of the functionality and the design of the site does. Ultimately this page may serve as a "lite" demonstration for non-registered users.
Standards - The standards of the home page directly mirror those of the rest of the site as they draw upon the same resources. E.g., the same IUPAC standards for molecule nomenclature are adhered to here as well.
Controls - The demonstrations have been designed to be self-explanatory. The "Try it!" section of each action description contains instructions for interacting with each section.
Future considerations - Certainly this page can benefit from a styling face-lift at some point, but the idea for this update was to get a functional draft of the demonstrations up. Further possible updates might be: the introduction of more sample metabolic pathways to view, support for more sample start/goal molecules in the pathway searcher, more organic molecules shown to explore, a more interactive sample of the process of reviewing a pathway, and the introduction of a discover demonstration.
