Welcome to the new digs.
Streamlined for browsing, optimized for mobile, and featuring a sleek new look, it is with unbridled excitement that we unveil our new website (take a look »). Over a year in the making, this redesign marks the first major overhaul of sup.org in ten years. Our site—which first debuted during the Mosaic era of the Internet—received its first proper redesign in 2005, and has throughout its decade-long tenure, remained more or less the spitting image of its 2005-self.
Needless to say, the past ten years have brought with them a legion of dramatic changes to the online ecosystem, not to mention evolutions in web style and graphic design. So, in 2013 we began reimagining our website. At the nuts and bolts level, we wanted a more robust site with new features that better served our users; aesthetically, we wanted to give the site a modern gloss and make navigation more intuitive and enjoyable.
To this end, creating a better mobile experience was a top priority. Today, over 10% of our daily traffic comes from mobile devices, and 5% from tablets—so we’ve optimized the new site to adapt to a wider range of screen sizes, creating an easy-to-read mobile interface. We’ve also simplified the book browsing process, both on mobile and desktop views, by giving greater visual prominence to book covers; books can be perused at leisure either in an image-driven grid view or a detail-oriented list view.
We’ve also built new features into the site that take advantage of the newly available treasure trove of book metadata. Moving forward, we hope to make more information available about each book by providing more excerpts as well as detailed Tables of Contents that offer overviews not only of the book, but of individual chapters within a book as well. Also, citations for any book on our site can now be generated at the click of a button—when users opt to "cite this book" they can submit book metadata to EasyBib and format their citation according to whichever style guide they prefer.
While revamping the site, another important focus was to create more opportunities for engagement. As a result, the new site foregrounds our social media channels to invite visitors into more immediate conversations—on scholarship, current events, publishing, and more. Links in the footer of the website will direct visitors to SUP’s myriad social media channels (including Facebook and Tumblr, among others)—while our Twitter feed and blog queue pipe in directly to the home page.
All told, the site has undergone substantial renovation—all for the better we believe. While we hope you enjoy the new digs, we also acknowledge that there is always room for improvement, so please feel free to send us your comments should you have any—we appreciate the feedback!
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