If you frequently visit our Web site, or are a regular reader of the Mapping Bulletin, you’ve already noticed that things look a bit different around here! Yes, it’s true, we recently rolled out a completely new Web site. This is the first major overhaul of our site since 2003. Suffice it to say we were long overdue for a revamping.
The most obvious visible change is the graphic design. Beyond that though, we made a significant number of functional enhancements to the site. Here is a quick rundown of some highlights:
- The main homepage now includes quick summaries of our most popular resources: news, upcoming events, geospatial jobs, and links to our online tools such as ControlFinder, WHAIFinder, and our Catalog of Aerial Photography.
- Our Geospatial Jobs page, by far the most popular page on our site, was completely redesigned. As part of this, job seekers can now sign up for daily e-mail “alerts” containing any new jobs we’ve posted in the last 24 hours.
- The Mapping Bulletin is now-fully integrated into the “main” SCO Web site. We split it off back in 2007 in order to take advantage of a content management system to manage our news articles. It was time to bring them back together!
- Another new feature is the use of “tags” to link related content. Nearly every page on the site is “tagged” with one or more categories. Click on a tag under each article, and you will get a complete list of other articles with that same tag. Likewise, most pages have an “Also See” bar on the right that takes you to related information found on our site.
- Web feeds (a.k.a, RSS feeds) are now an important feature of our site. In particular, each of our “tags” is available as a unique web feed. So what? This means you can now subscribe to very focused content on our site, and automatically receive updates in your feed reader software. Check out our Web Feeds page for more details.
- We are experimenting with something new called “Hot Links.” This is a quick way for us to share interesting tidbits we find out of the web… stuff we think you will find interesting as well. You’ll find our Hot Links listed on the right side of many of our pages, and also on our home page.
…. I could go on with an even longer list of new stuff, but I think you get it! Please browse around let us know what you think. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any feedback!