Last summer, we sent out a survey to you lovely lot, wanting to know your thoughts on our organisation and how we could improve. One standout feature of the feedback was our website; a lot of you felt it was difficult to navigate, had too much content, and too much text.
So…we listened! After a discussion at our autumn meeting, the committee decided to give our site a much-needed revamp, and I really hope you like the finished product! As always, we welcome your feedback and if there are any issues or little niggles, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. There are some quite big changes, so I wanted to be transparent with you about the process.
Firstly, we did love our old site, which was very kindly created for us by a company called PDC, and mainly orchestrated by our founders, Lucy McRobert and Pete Gamby. However, the long list of changes we wanted to make meant that we felt it was easier to build a new site. We made the executive decision to change from Wordpress to Wix, as we have matured from being mainly a blog to a fully-grown organisation, and Wix gave us more freedom to do what we wanted with the aesthetics of the site. We’ve made it a bit more user friendly (less tabs and menus!) and tried to make it more interactive – there is more imagery, less text, and you can directly pledge for Now for Nature or subscribe to our newsletter by filling in a simple form on the site. We also have an events calendar, so you can now keep up-to-date with all our upcoming events and projects in real time!
One big change is we’ve chosen to not to carry on with our ‘members’ section. As the AFON membership grows, we would struggle to keep up with the adding of profiles and keeping them updated. However, some things have stayed the same. Our awesome blog is still up and running, it’s just had a wee bit of a face lift (as I will say in a minute, we are still in the process of finishing the website, so all of our wonderful past blogs haven't yet been transferred over)! We’ve also kept with the familiar AFON colour scheme that we know and love, including the iconic orange. And, our lovely puffin is here to stay! Some parts of the site are still works in progress – the mentoring page, for example – so please be patient with us. They will be ready soon!
As I said, I really hope you love the new site just as much as we do. And of course, it comes with another exciting announcement – the launch of our exciting new photography competition, in conjunction with NUS! All the details can be found on the website. The theme is, of course, #NowforNature, and there are three categories to enter – Now for Nature, Hidden Nature, and My Local Patch. We also have some famous faces on the judging panel (anyone heard of Gordon Buchanan…?) so you would have the chance of your work being seen by some of the best in the business, as well as being in with a chance of winning some phenomenal prizes! So if you’re a keen photographer, or just want to give it a bash, head over to our shiny new site and get involved!!!
Isla Hodgson, A Focus on Nature's Associate Director
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