Update: Our Website Project
As you may have noticed, a lot of our work has been put on pause for the past couple weeks. The reason is simple: the project to upgrade our website has grown from a bit of rewriting into a full-fledged reorganization.
This, for the record, is a very good thing.
When we started, the immediate goal was to reorganize our top navigation into a more logical order, and then re-write the Issues and Policy section of the site. The current content is little more than an updated and slightly revised version of the final platform of our predecessor, the Modern Whig Party, as adopted by the last national convention in May 2016.
We thought by using that material we could easily build on the old party’s foundations and be something both new and familiar. But we were wrong. Not only did we create the wrong impression in the minds of many, but we ended up being totally misaligned with the Forums and Roundtables structure which lies at the heart of the Institute.
What’s more, in reviewing what we currently have on our hands and what we have planned for the future — much of which is dependent on the size of our membership — we also realized now is the time to make an almost completely fresh start. Many of the initiatives we have in the works are long-held Modern Whig ambitions which the old party was either unable to execute, or prevented from doing, by law, as a political party. We now have the opportunity to pursue them.
This is not my actual keyboard.
Given all that, we made the decision to put a hold on everything and concentrate solely on the website upgrade. We honestly thought it would take just a couple days, but as it turned out there was a lot of back-end documentation to contend with (we inherited quite a bit from our forebears) as well as a crying need for some new conceptualizing and the language to go with it.
So here is where we stand: our first priority is to finish the Issues and Policy section. Rather than to revise it piecemeal, we’ve decided to complete the entire rewrite of that part of the site in the background and then swap it all out at once. We should be finally done with that in time for the distribution of our Monthly Gazette on Tuesday, March 23.
Next will be a top-to-bottom revision of every page on the site. That will be an ongoing process, so expect to see changes just about every day for a while. Some of them will be fairly subtle, but others will warrant an immediate announcement on Facebook and Twitter. Everything significant will be summarized in our weekly letters and the Gazette.
As we go along, we’ll be publishing some fresh content as well. It’s part and parcel of the project, in fact, and something we’re very excited about. We’re incredibly fortunate to have some remarkable talent in our fold already, and we’re proud to be able to provide a platform for Whig thought as well as a process for the development of Whig policy.
Once we’ve completed this phase of the launch — as intriguing a turn as it has taken — we’re going to be able to pivot to not only full-fledged operations, but a consistent publishing schedule through a variety of channels. So stay tuned.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org.
