About the new web site design

Returning readers will notice that our web site looks somewhat different today. I’ve made a bunch of changes on the surface. You’ll notice that things look a little crisper, more polished, and overall more readable. Some redundant content has been trimmed out, and the important stuff has been made more prominent.

There have been vastly bigger changes under the hood, though. This is stuff that you can’t see, but I think it’s going to make a much bigger difference for readers over the long run than the cosmetic enhancements will. Why? Because we’ve finally got a clean slate for what we’re planning for the future.

As you may recall over the summer, neoHOUSTON partnered with CNU-Houston to revamp the CNU-Houston website and make it more useful, and CNU-Houston became neoHOUSTON’s first affiliate organization. This association is pretty simple and natural, since I’m heavily involved in CNU-Houston. In the months since the neoHOUSTON / CNU-Houston agreement began I was elected President of CNU-Houston, which I’m very excited about.

But other than helping out an organization with its web presence, the “affiliate” idea hasn’t meant anything in the past. That’s partially because it takes time to build effective partnerships and learn what to do with them, but it’s also largely because we didn’t have our technology set up to do what we wanted it to do.

Going forward, neoHOUSTON is going to be less of a personal blog, and more of a hub for urban advocates in the Houston region. Working with CNU-Houston, we hope to develop effective partnerships with a number of other local organizations, and to be able to create a mutually beneficial relationship where affiliated organizations help make each other more visible and more connected. neoHOUSTON’s goal is to simply hang out in the background and provide technical assistance to that end. That’s why our back-end technology is really important.

When are you going to start seeing the results of these efforts? Well, these things take time. I’d say late spring or summer is a safe bet, based on a number of factors. I’ll be excited to announce new partnerships as they are solidified, so stay tuned.

Aside from partnerships with community organizations, I also intend to open up the site to more contributors. We’ve enjoyed some really excellent posts from guest contributors in the last year, and I’d like to increase the frequency with which those happen. I’ll be making a more detailed announcement about guest contributors shortly.

Lastly, regarding technology on the web, if you’ve spent any time programming web sites you’ll quickly come to hate Internet Explorer. Its outdated and non-standards-compliant rendering engine makes browser compatibility virtually impossible to achieve. Fortunately, most neoHOUSTON readers use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera, all of which render the site correctly. For those of you on Internet Explorer 7 or earlier, things may not be so nice for the time being. Know that I’m aware of the issue, and I’m working on it.

So, welcome to our refreshed web site, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed designing and writing it!