The website is very much a work in progress, yes. But then websites generally do look bad in the beginning, until the influx of fresh eyes help the developers see the trouble spots.

No, that's not how it normally works for a professional website. Normally websites aren't designed by developers but are designed by a webdesigner. On top of that there are readymade solutions for forums. LessWrong for example uses the reddit framework.

The website would probably profit from starting from scratch with a proper design.

Emails and posts are going out to these groups as fast as we can make them, but we chose to contact LessWrong as early in the process as possible, because, as you point out, it is a large and diverse community.

So you choose to contact Lesswrong for recruitment at a time where it's inprobable that your recruiting is very successful because it's large...