American Whitewater is excited to share the launch of our new website! The new site offers our community enhanced opportunities to get involved, learn about, and support our work on a modern and visually compelling platform. Developed on the WordPress platform, our new site will be much easier and more affordable for us to keep fresh and interesting than our old custom-coded site.
In With the New
The new site is split into three sections. Explore is where you can learn about whitewater rivers, safety, and our organization–as well as read the American Whitewater Journal. Engage is where you can take action on important issues, check out events, and take a deeper dive into our stewardship projects. Support is where you find options to help American Whitewater’s work through membership, donations, and other forms of giving. The site will continue to feature news articles on our work with the river community to protect, restore, and enjoy whitewater rivers. You can see what’s happening in your region in the footer links, and as always jump to our river guide.
Out With the Old
Our old website served us well but was, well, old! It still had code hiding in it from 1998, and was really just a chronological news feed with lots of links to documents. It performed poorly when linked to social media, was hard to share our work on, and was expensive and increasingly risky to maintain. Site visitors might miss a small number of old features or content that are not on the new site, some of which we’ll be working back into our new platform over time, and some of which we intentionally let go. Big picture, it’s the right move for our organization to move on from the old site.
American Whitewater’s Online Future is Bright
Our new site is easy for staff to edit and update. That means we can deliver more compelling river safety materials, help you take action on your local river issues more quickly, and tell better stories of the amazing rivers we all enjoy. The new site is also more shareable which will help us – and you – amplify our work. Another big benefit is that the change frees up our programming team to focus on improving our river guide and apps.
No Changes to the National Whitewater Inventory
We’ve split our website into two sites housed together under americanwhitewater.org: 1) the new wordpress site, and 2) our National Whitewater Inventory. The new WordPress site replaces everything on our old site except our online crowdsourced river guide (the National Whitewater Inventory), located under the “River Info” link on our main site. The river guide itself is not being changed by the roll out of the new WordPress main site. With this said, we have some exciting upgrades in the works for our river guide that we’ve rolled out recently and will continue to roll out. One example is that we recently brought back the “What’s Running” option to our online river map.
Props to the Crew
We can’t thank our all-star group of programmers enough for their work on the site. Eric Rounds Agency led the challenging WordPress site project with help from the rest of the team; our river guide is powered by Owen Coutts, Nick Gottlieb, Ryan Groth, and Jesse Rosenzweig; and our apps are the work of Drew Althage and Owen Coutts. It’s all a team effort that includes a ton of volunteer effort, and it’s a superb team.
Find a Bug?
If you encounter a bug or unexpected challenges using the new American Whitewater website (excluding the river pages), please let us know and describe the issue through filling out this form.
Submit an Event to Our Online Calendar
In addition to American Whitewater festivals, our volunteers and affiliate clubs host many other events around the country. We participate in several of these events when there are opportunities to promote membership, raise funds for river stewardship work, improve visibility and communications with the community, and support our partners.
Community events include Festivals, Clinics, Clean-ups, and Races. We’ll post the event to our website and will publish the Event Name, Date, Location, and event website url. To submit an event, please use this form.