By Becky Kerner
Two+ years ago, SIAM set out to update our main website - www.siam.org. Our primary goal for this project was to make our website easier to use, and generally more valuable, for those in our community. We wanted to give you information that's relevant to you, and make finding that info a piece of cake. Hello usability and functionality! Through surveys, focus groups, and hundreds of conversations, we talked to you - our community members - about what would be most helpful. Through an updated look and feel (2018: We. Have. Arrived.), better organization of information, and more robust technological integrations, we hope we've delivered. Read on to find out more about where we focused our efforts, new features, and please take some time to peruse the new site yourself. Enjoy!
What's New?
Responsive / Mobile Friendly
Though pretty straightforward, this is a biggie: our website is officially user-friendly on a smartphone! If you've visited our site on your phone in the past (we know 15% of you out there have!), then you know it's nearly impossible to do anything productive with that shrunken version of the desktop site. Now on your phone, you'll be served a site that you can not only read (yay!), but that's been strategically designed with a mobile user in mind. Features of note: readable text without requiring zoom, adequate space for tap targets, and no horizontal scrolling required.
Focus on Areas of Research
Through countless conversations with members of the community, we've learned that people have found the content on siam.org to be useful, but struggle to find information, especially information pertinent to them. Because of that, a significant focus of this project was to better gather and organize information of relevance. We mapped all SIAM publications, conferences, activity groups, and general areas of community interest to 17 core research areas, like data science, linear algebra, optimization, and more. On these pages, you'll find cross-pollination of information from related journals and books, to SIAM News articles, relevant job postings, SIAM prizes, activity groups - plus RSS feeds to easily subscribe directly to this information.
Synchronization with SIAM's Database
New integrations with our database allow for information of key volunteers, which has historically been displayed on the website - those on SIAM committees, editorial and activity group boards, prize selection committees, student chapters, and more - to automatically update on the website as soon as you update it in your user profile. Remember to always keep your information up-to-date so not only SIAM knows how best to contact you, but now for your information to display accurately on our website, too. Update your information now.
Comprehensive Cross-Domain Site Search
If you've ever wished there was one place you could go to search for content spanning across all SIAM web domains - our journals and books sites, SIAM Job Board, and SIAM News, we've made that wish a reality. The search - located in the top right of the new SIAM website - delivers results from all of these important hubs of information, so you can easily find whatever you're seeking.
archive.siam.org
Do you use our website to reference historic information? It wouldn't surprise us if you did, considering our conference archive alone gets 20K+ views every year. We've ensured you won't lose access to the years (actually, decades) of information available on our previous website by creating archive.siam.org. Currently, this is essentially a duplication of our previous website, where you can access old information that is now frozen in time. Very retro. Some sections will pop you over to the new website for the most updated information, others will keep you on page for reference of older content. A link to the archive can be found in the very top left of the new website.
Google Translate
SIAM is proud to be part of a global community of scientists and mathematicians. To make our website more usable to those outside the United States, or for those whom English is not their first language, we've added Google Translate to the site. This allows users to easily translate the website into their language of choice. To translate, see the Google icon in the bottom right corner of the site.
Resources for Getting Involved
Not only are we now providing more information about how SIAM is involved in the global applied math and computational science communities, but you can find out easily how you can get involved, too! From volunteering your time or donating money, to simply spreading the word about SIAM and the fields we represent, you can have an impact. Check out our pages on our collaborations, getting involved, and our Newsroom for resources and information to share with your own networks, like flyers, videos, logos, social media photos, and more. And don't forget, you can now share helpful content via email and social media right from our website through the ShareThis widget, which resides on the bottom left of our key resource pages (see the black circle with an arrow in it).
If you'd like to offer feedback on the new website, just click the "Feedback" widget on the bottom right side of your browser.
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Becky Kerner is the digital communications and brand manager at SIAM. |