Web Site Enhancements

Posted Feb 24, 2021


You may notice a few small changes on the web site… or maybe you missed them!  Here’s a quick run-down of what you might see.

Menu Changes

On “About”

Up in the menu, we’ve consolidated the previously separate “Leadership” and “History” menu items into one, along with “Mission”, since all of this information is located on one web page anyway.

We’ve added an In Memoriam page to honor botanists, both professional and enthusiasts, who had passed.  Recent entries may be highlighted in the Announcement section of the main web page.

New: “Events”

The Events menu item is new.  Two sub-menu items are there… one that will take you to a calendar of events upcoming, and the other will take you to web posts about videos available on YouTube, Facebook, and any other video media online.

Chapters Expansion

Previously the Chapters menu item was a standalone entry, and you had to click there to go to another page to find your chapter.  Well, that still works, but if you already know which chapter’s web page you want to visit, you’ll find all the chapters listed as sub-menus under the main Chapter menu item.

New: “Conservation”

The Conservation menu is a new pointer to a collection of articles about — you guessed it — conservation!  The focus here is on conservation of native plants, though you might find an occasional article about conservation of other precious natural resources around Arizona.  Explore this menu item and you’ll find some extracts from previous editions of The Plant Press related to conservaation.

On “Grow Native”

We’ve slightly changed a few names of sub-menus so some of the resources are more readily identifiable to new visitors to the site.  Returning visitors might notice the change… but they’re subtle. Can you remember what they used to say?  Didn’t think so!

More “Resources”

The Resources menu has been expanded slightly.  Some things listed there were already on the site… but you had to know where to look.  We’ll continue to list resources new and old here, so they’re readily available to you.

The Home Page

We’ve done a little brush-up of the home page.  The most notable change will be that the chapter map has been moved to the Chapters page, and in its place is a new “News and Blog Items” listing.  As important and timely items come up, we’ll pin a few of these “newsy-bloggy thingies” here.  Each one will have a link to the full article, followed by a small teaser to you know what’s on the other side of that mouse click.

On the home page and throughout, we’ve updated some old links, and consolidated the dual Join and Renew buttons into one joint “Join/Renew” button… since they both went to the same page anyway.  Other small enhancements like a border around The Plant Press latest edition thumbnail, so it doesn’t look like the page is just floating out in space.

We also replaced the “sunrise movie” that played in the heading of the Home Page with a static sunset picture.  We know the movie was nice, but your devices didn’t really appreciate having to load a 6MB file every time you visited the site, and the static image is a good bit smaller than that.  Less clogging of the Internet arteries, and faster viewing of the information you really came to see.