We have just made a number of upgrades to American Whitewater’s website.
There are several new features designed to optimize performance and minimize staff time required to maintain the website.
RSS support. AW joins a host of news organizations, community website, and personal web logs in offering this service. You no longer have to check the AW site each day for updated news but can set up a news feed with an RSS reader.
Move to Standards-Based HTML. This change improves website performance and consistency across a wider range of browsers and platforms.
Updated Menu. Several items on our website were difficult to find requiring users to click through up to three layers of menus. We have changed the menu layout to one primary menu with unique secondary menus for each topic on the primary menu.
Merger of Conservation and Access into a new Stewardship page. The new emphasis on stewardship reflects our move from separate conservation and access programs to an integrated river stewardship program.
Greater visibility for our Stewardship Toolkit. The toolkit represents a decade of knowledge from AW staff and board with several examples and suggestions on approaches for dealing with river conservation and access issues of interest to our membership.
Several Backend Changes. Some major changes to our content management system may not be immediately evident but they will make a big difference in the content you see and the ability of staff to keep that content up to date. As the volume of content on our website grew keeping information current had become a major challenge. We have now moved to a much more efficient content management system and extensive use of wiki to enable any staff member to quickly update information on our site without having to directly edit html and upload changes with ftp.
Want to see new features? Every time we receive an email with suggestions on new features those thoughts are passed along to the the web committee and logged into our web projects database. Recent ideas have included improvements to our mapping features, addition of more non-USGS gauges, expansion of our content to areas outside the US, and developing a text interface to the website optimized for handhelds. AW has very limited resources to develop new features (our primary goal being a commitment to our project work), but we welcome volunteers with experience in web development.
Are you having any problems? Over the past week we have fixed a number of bugs that were not apparent during beta testing of the new site. We have noticed some problems with older proprietary browsers that may not properly display the website. If you are having problems you might consider updating your browser, particularly if you have not done so for several years. Try Firefox on Mac, Unix, or Windows or the newest version of iCab on older Macs.