To: ARRL Staff and Board

Cc: Fathom

I wanted to let everyone know what is happening with the new Web site.  We met Monday with Fathom’s staff and we reviewed a few last issues to be refined on the new Web site. While these individual items are not difficult to complete, together they add up to a few days work.  Concurrent with this effort,   Jon Bloom and his staff, working with Fathom, are also implementing a solution for the hardware and bandwidth issues that we also identified during our testing last week.

Our current plan is to make the final pre-launch adjustments and to open up the site for additional testing to more people – including all Section Managers.  While some SMs are already testing the Site, we would like all Section Managers to populate their pages and review parts of the site. We will begin this process today.  Because of the short week and the holidays this weekend, we have decided to use the next few days fine-tuning and testing the site with an actual launch after Easter, early in the week of April 5. 

We also request that any employees or Board Members, who have a personal login on the current Web site, check their login on the new Web site.  All logins should work now.  Please report any problems to Katie Glass.  Also, the store is now live, so if you enter a credit card number and make a purchase, your credit card will be charged.  If you would like to be a test purchaser, please contact Bob Inderbitzen or Amy Hurtado.  Additionally, if you modify your membership data, that also will be changed permanently.

This launch has been a frustrating, long and difficult process for all of us.  But just think of what we have accomplished.  During the past two years we have conducted extensive research about what people want from the ARRL Web site; we created an entirely new architecture and navigation scheme; and we approved and implemented a fresh and contemporary new design.  After that, we extensively edited our current Web content and created lots of brand new content including multimedia. Many of us also learned how to use the new content editor and began adding material to the new Web site.  During the past few months, we have polished up that content section by section and we began implementing and testing the incredibly complicated functionality, ecommerce, advertising and database connections of the new Web site.

 It has been a lot of work and it is disappointing that we are not out the door quite yet.  But, we are now in the home stretch.  I realize that I have said this before but it bears repeating.  We just want to make sure that when we commit to the final launch, that the site looks great, works well and is something that we can all be proud of.  Thanks to all of you who have helped.  It will be worth the effort.

73,

Harold

Harold Kramer, WJ1B

Chief Operating Officer

ARRL - The national association for Amateur Radio™

225 Main Street

Newington, CT 06111

Telephone: 860 594 0220

email: hkramer@arrl.org

web:   www.arrl.org/