by Shelly King
As webmistress for OMVNA.org, I’m thrilled to announce that we have relaunched our website! The goal of the update was not only to make it prettier, but to also make it more functional.
It’s So Very Pretty
At least I think it’s pretty. And I hope you do, too. I wanted to make the site as colorful as our neighborhood is.
Search, search, search!
One of the biggest leaps forward for the site was adding a Search feature. Now instead of poking around the site all day looking for that one thing you want, you can enter a word or two in the Search box and get back any article on the site that has those words.
Newsletter Archive
All articles that appear in the printed newsletter also go on our website. And usually, it’s a newsletter article that people are looking for. So I’ve move the newsletter archive to the very top of the site. On the left sidebar, you can click on a year and then a month to see the articles for that newsletter. These links are always visible no matter where you are in the site. (Note: There’s a huge archive of newsletters and I don’t have them all migrated to the new site yet. But there is a link at the top of the site to the Old Site where you can find the complete archive until the migration is complete.)
Upcoming Events
Another reason a lot of people come to the site is to find out when something is happening. To better meet that need, I added and Events section at the top of the right sidebar. This is where you’ll find place and time information for all the OMVNA upcoming events.
Quick Links
Under the surface, I found a treasure trove of links to downtown guides, transit information, and other useful links. I moved these links to the right sidebar so people would know they were there and could get to them easily.
Article Comments
Another big feature is that now you can comment on the newsletter articles online. At the end of any newsletter article, you’ll find a section where you can post a comment. Right now the comments are unmonitored and I’d like to keep them that way. So please keep it clean, keep it classy!
For the Geeks Out There
The website is powered by WordPress, an open source software tool that’s usually used to run blogs. Open source means it was created by a community of passionate developers. And it’s free! WordPress gives the site nice publishing and content management tools that make working with the site much easier.
But wait! There’s more! At least more to come. This is only phase one. Soon you’ll be seeing more video, more pictures, neighborhood polls, and other cool stuff. So check OMVNA.org frequently to see more changes!
