New APEX Website
Welcome to the new APEX website!
The Arizona Power Exchange has had a website for nearly 30 years–needless to say, it’s changed a lot over the course of the club’s history. Most recently, we moved the website to a new platform in 2023. This was a great move for us that allowed us to significantly reduce the technology cost and overhead associated with the website. Unfortunately, with some transitions in leadership and volunteer availability and expertise, we’ve had difficulty supporting the site and providing new features and content as much as we would have wanted to.
So we’ve redecorated!
The website is now (once again) running on WordPress. But this time, we’ve rebuilt everything from the ground up. Admittedly, the website is somewhat no-frills right now, especially in terms of design. (Marketing Chair’s Note: Most of my website visual design skills are ~20 years old at this point. Send help. – Holo) But we have some powerful new features, as well as under-the-hood capabilities, that are going to enable us to do so much more going forward.
We were working under a few key principles as we built the new site:
- Keep the site as fast and accessible as possible for people on all devices.
- Eliminate redundant or repetitive work whenever possible.
- Treat the site as the “system of record” for all of our calendar needs.
- Keep it easy to work on, especially for non-technical volunteers.
It’s been a tricky balancing act, but hopefully we have achieved all of the above!
We’ll cover a few of the features we’ve added in the rest of this article, but there’s probably better way to learn about the new website than by using it! So feel free to browse around, see what content is where, see how things work. If you run into any issues, or want to provide feedback, just scroll down to the bottom of any page and click on the Website Feedback link.
Fast, Accessible, and Responsive
We’ve gone to great lengths to ensure the website is useful for as many of our members as possible, regardless of device choice, connection speed, visual acuity, or other factors. Without getting too technical, we’re trying to achieve a score of 90% or above on performance for each page, and 95% or above for accessibility. These numbers might change once the website is live, but so far we’ve achieved and exceeded those numbers for every page except for a few heavy calendar views.
We’ve also brought back dark mode. But this time it’s a “smart” dark mode that will activate automatically if your device is set to use dark mode. And we’re making sure that everything remains legible and high-contrast even with the colors flipped.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Managing a calendar for an organization as active as APEX is a lot of work. We have to create hundreds of calendar events each year on the website alone. What gets even worse is when we need to edit those events in order to adjust pricing or policy statements or links to our member application. It takes a lot of effort to make those changes, and the reality is we often miss a lot of places that we need to change.
So when we rebuilt the website, we built as much content as possible as reusable chunks called “patterns”. What’s great is that these patterns stay in sync globally if they are updated anywhere. This should greatly reduce the amount of effort required to keep our content up-to-date and consistent.
And then there’s FetLife. Which basically multiplies all of our efforts to maintain our calendar by a factor of two.
Example RSVP Button
The good news is, we have some new tools in place to help with that, too. It’s extremely technical, but going forward, we’ll have a much better means of keeping our website calendar and our FetLife events consistent and in sync with each other, and more tightly integrated. For example, any event on the website calendar that also exists on FetLife will include an “RSVP on FetLife” button to make it easy for you to sign up.
Help Wanted!
We’ve designed the website to be easier to manage for our volunteers, especially without the need for technical expertise. But there’s still a lot we need help with, both with the website as well as with APEX’s other online, communication and marketing needs.
We’d love more help in the following areas especially:
- Website & Content Design – WordPress
- Graphic Design – Canva, Photoshop, Inkscape, Affinity
- Social Media Marketing – Instagram
- Software Development – WordPress, Python, Selenium
If you have interest in helping our Marketing Committee with any of these needs, please reach out to: [email protected] via email or message @Holo on FetLife. (If you’ve spoken with anyone before about helping, now’s a good time to reach out again, too!)