We’re rebuilding our website on a modern platform and redesigning it in the process. Here’s what the design may look like. What do you think?

Keep reading for a link to see the whole thing.

An open, participatory spirit is at the core of Greater Greater Washington. Our articles and Breakfast Links come from volunteers among you, our community, and the site is only valuable if you enjoy reading it and sometimes take action.

That’s why we discussed logo options and got your input on the winning logo (including feedback from the comments which led to tweaking the tagline and making it even greater!) It’s also why we collected your input on what you like and hate about our current site.

While many websites hunker down to redesign their site and suddenly bust out with a new one, we wanted to hear from you at key points along the process. Our designer and site builder, Derek Hogue, has done some great work and put together a homepage design that we think has a lot going for it. Before we move further, we wanted to hear your thoughts.

Before you look at it, a few important caveats

This is a mockup, not a live site. It’s trying to establish the overall design. Many minor details will still change — we’re showing this to you early, which means it’s early.

A lot of content is placeholder. For instance, the category section for “Maryland” has many non-Maryland posts, and so forth. That’s because which post goes in which section isn’t what this is focusing on.

The “Greater Washington Essentials” section at the bottom doesn’t have the actual categories or posts that it would really have (that’ll be an area for “evergreen” stuff that’s always good to read if you want to learn more about the region).

Therefore, some things might not be clear from the static version and/or the one with the posts in the wrong places, but will be clearer later. Feel free to note anything that’s confusing to you, however — it could be valuable to know.

You’re just seeing a static image. If you have a smaller screen (or are on mobile), you won’t see it all at once. It’ll definitely be a responsive design that shrinks and ultimately condenses into one column for smaller screens and mobile devices; that’s just not something you can see at this point.

Now that you’ve read all that, check it out!

Why we have to do this

“But everything is fine,” you might say (and some of you did on our survey, though many said the opposite). “Why does something need to change?”

A few reasons:

  1. The site runs on code I wrote entirely myself, which has built up over many years. I know how to add features (and have a lot of flexibility), but I’m the only one, and that’s no way to run a real organization. Since I wrote most of it, these new blog platforms have arisen that are much more maintanable.
  2. The backend needs to be better. Our contributors have to write their posts in HTML and use somewhat clunky systems to import images. Modern blog platforms make this much easier. I initially wrote the code for my own use personally, so it wasn’t a big deal if some backend features were hard for others to use, but now we have about 80 people writing articles in the last 3 months.
  3. The “reverse chronological” format works well for frequent visitors who want to read everything and know what’s new since they were here last, but it’s not great for occasional and new visitors. These folks want to be able to see, at a glance, some articles they may want to read. If you just show one, it’s not necessarily the right one. We spend too much time worrying about what order and time to post articles because of this.
  4. We’re growing to be more than a blog. We have an organizer advocating for more market-rate and affordable housing. Can you tell from reading the site? We need to better convey the range of our activities (while still keeping a focus on the content every day).
  5. Relative to our traffic, not a lot of people sign up for the daily email. (You might have said, “what daily email?” Exactly! It’s here, for now.) We need to be doing better at telling people who visit the site how they can keep in touch, if they’re interested.
  6. There are many other things people have learned about designing a good site since 2009, when Joey Katzen kindly devised our current site (and did a great job with it!) Anyway, it’s just been a long time now.

What won’t change

We’ve decided not to switch to a third party comment system like Disqus. Many of you said you thought it was a good idea, but many also said it was not. While it’ll cost more to rebuild on a new platform (and won’t be exactly the same), the comment system is working pretty well and we don’t want to mess with something that isn’t broken.

That doesn’t mean nothing will change with comments. We’re looking into some level of threading and other changes to make them work better. We’re not up to that yet, though — we’ll talk more when we are.

Also, if you like reverse chronological posts, there will still be parts of the page that show all the posts, and a separate page to see everything just in that order as well.

Finally, we certainly hope the quality of content and our other activities will only get better!

How we’ll use your feedback

You can say whatever you like in the comments (as long as it complies with the comment policy, of course). But while we want your thoughts in this process, it’s not going to be a vote. A site designed by too many people ends up being very uninspiring. And keeping the old site is not on the table.

However, there are a lot of smart folks out there and there’s a good chance you might think of a point we hadn’t considered. For example, commenters duncan, Kevon, cyco, and Jasper had suggestions to improve our tagline after we published the new logo. We changed it from “The Washington, DC area is great >> but it could be greater.” to “The Washington, DC area is great >> and it can be greater.” A small thing, but I think meaningful, and something that came from you.

That’s why we wanted to show this to you before it’s very far along. What would you change? We sincerely hope you point out things we didn’t think of and make this even better. Check it out and leave your thoughts in the comments. Thank you!

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.