Video proved successful by simple metrics. A lot users clicked the videos and thought they added to the whole experience.

We featured image based navigation that got very negative responses that it was counter intuitive. Our theory was that curiosity would spark exploration of the navigation. We were wrong, people looked for text.

You need a CMS because uploading articles in HTML is incredibly time consuming and your hours to articles ratio is terrible.

People in the test and that we showed the site to instinctively looked for standard navigation like categories. Another reason a CMS is needed: to automatically create that taxonomy for you.

Links were seen as clutter and extraneous by all the users. They wanted to read the article first, and click links second. Thus if I had time to design a new article page Id move the links down.

Clean design is seen as cool and modern so it can support your (hopefully) cool and modern content.

Hope that helped Joe.