The new website will go live on Tuesday, June 10, in the late morning.

Please note that while the Communications & Marketing and IT Services teams will be closely monitoring the transition, updates will not appear instantly in a few minutes. The rollout is a gradual process on this date, so we kindly ask for your patience and understanding.

If you don’t see immediate changes, rest assured that the teams are actively working behind the scenes.

Website CMS: Pre-Access Preparation for Website Launch 

• Tuesday, April 1, from 1:00 - 3:00 pm EDT

• Friday, April 4, from 1:00 - 3:00 pm EDT

Website CMS: Website Launch Preparation & QA Readiness

• Wednesday, April 9, from 1:00 - 3:00 pm EDT

Website CMS: Hands-On Training for Website Content Review and QA

• Tuesday, May 6, from 1:00 - 3:00 pm EDT

A new icon will appear on your Okta dashboard, allowing you to log in and begin editing your content shortly after the May 6 training which focuses on the backend access in WordPress. The staff listed in the Internal Aspen Comms spreadsheet will be granted access.

Program staff will have roughly May 6 through May 30 to make any necessary content updates before the website goes live. This extended window—nearly four weeks instead of the previously communicated two—gives you more flexibility to finalize your content.

All programs will receive training on how to use the new website, enabling them to manage and update their own program pages. For those seeking additional support, we now offer premium services through our Creative Services division. This includes assistance with content strategy, maintenance, promotion, and more, to ensure program pages are fully optimized.

WDG will do a scripted migration of content and a first-pass of QA cleanup on program pages. Existing content from the website will be migrated over, but programs should expect to make manual edits to their content after the migration to have their pages looking their best. This QA work will be the topic of the April 9 training.

Likely April 11.

If possible, we suggest you find those posts in the current site and re-tag with the up-to-date Related Program. If done by April 11, then those will be migrated with the up-to-date Related Program.

No, the website redesign is fully funded and there will not be costs to programs for content migration.

Programs with external websites will have at least a single program page on the redesigned website. External website content will be indexed for the redesigned website’s federated (multi-site) search.

There is not a limit. You may not want all of them to be primary level within your menu though. The menu system will also account for drop-downs to deeper pages within your program.

Depends on the design used, but most headers have the "eyebrow" style breadcrumb built into them.

WordPress comes with a bunch of options to crop a photo to meet your layout needs. The biggest issue you can run into is if the source image is too small for a larger layout. With that in mind, we’ll have recommendations for image aspect ratios and some direction on specific image dimensions for blocks.

Yes we are of the standards, the site is designed to WCAG 2.1. There is no dark mode but all designs go through testing

A few of the layouts are mocked up for mobile but not all of them. Each of the layouts are mobile responsive.

Ideally, video blocks will leverage videos stored in Nomad the digital asset management system that WordPress has been integrated with. YouTube is not going to be disabled, but the embed won’t have the features of the Nomad block.

ITS is not transferring videos that exist on the current site to Nomad. There are currently only 37 video files(.mp4 files) in the WP media library. All other videos on the site are links to YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Those links will most likely transfer since they are part of the content that is being migrated. Users can log into the current CMS and go to the Media library and filter by video to see what videos are currently in the media library in the CMS.

WordPress default is <strong> but you can “edit HTML” in a block and use <b> and it will publish without converting it to <strong> same applies to italics.

We will have additional trainings in the works to help for the Aspen specific build. There are a bunch of videos on YouTube about WordPress Gutenberg basics. Thankfully, you rarely need to do any HTML work, it’s mainly getting used to the interface.

The current approach is that ITS is not transferring videos that exist on the current site to Nomad. There are currently only 37 video files(.mp4 files) in the WP media library. All other videos on the site are links to YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Those links will most likely transfer since they are part of the content that is being migrated.

The current approach is that we want all event recordings and photography in Nomad as a standard. Videos can still be hosted on YouTube as well, but the central repository for video and image content needs to be Nomad to prevent Institute staff having to search through multiple 3rd party sources that all have different accounts and users.

Ultimately to take advantage of the new block system you will need to repurpose current content into the blocks for your pages. The migration will do some migration into the new blocks but only when structured content could be brought forward as such.

Yes, this is called the Advanced Query Block and it can be configured to do exactly that.

It’s not necessary to include the program name in every page name. Program pages will have their own navigation menu which includes the name of the program. The main Aspen Institute menu changes to a streamlined version when a user is on a Program page.

There will be a program footer where you can link your program’s social media platforms.

Headers have a minimum height pre set. Any image that comes over larger than that will be cropped to fit, anything too small will be stretched to fit.

The Yoast SEO plugin includes a duplicate key phrase check.

These colors are automatically changing based on the background color, but the colors cannot be user selected.

Scroll panels have the numbers built in, but there will be a panel option without numbers being necessary.

In the context of looking at a program page, the "view all" is a link defined by the website author of that page. So the program can create a child page with a longer list of what they'd like to be seen (and advanced query block), for example.

No.

We are going to maintain a sandbox version of the site that is password protected. Institute staff will be able to access it upon request. Deleting content will be at the discretion of your team. Trashed or draft posts won’t be migrated.

Avenir.

Yes there will be taxonomies for posts.

Current tags will migrate, and programs won’t have the ability to make new tags.

In the new system, a Category will denote post type, like it does now. There will be a meta field for the program name, and that’s the primary (ie, most recommended) way posts will be sorted by program. There’s also going to be a new taxonomy for Impact Areas, more to come on that later.

Recommended text length, there’s some guidance in the Program MVP Homepage and Program Extended documents, which were shared after the last training.

WDG recommends using the visual editor in Guttenberg to gauge for optimal length.