If you’ve been to our website in the last few days, you might have noticed some changes. In fact, we just pushed out a complete redesign, a refined logo, a completely rebuilt backend, a new campaigning infrastructure, and more.
Needless to say, we’re very excited! Below are a few highlights from this flurry of changes:
A beautiful new design.
Our Design Lead, Sage Cheng, composed a gorgeous design for the new site that highlights what is often the centerpiece of our work: our content. The truth is, Access Now sometimes feels as much like a media operation as a digital rights NGO. Our team of policy wonks and digital advocates is constantly churning out smart blog posts, savvy campaigns, and paradigm-shifting reports, so our new design places all of it front-and-center, with a series of image-heavy “tiles” on the front page, the blog, and elsewhere. We think this is a big improvement on the standard reverse chronological list of blog posts.
In addition, we’ve created five “buckets” for our programmatic work — Business and Human Rights, Digital Security, Freedom of Expression, Net Discrimination, and Privacy — that help structure and guide all of the content on our site (and, of course, the work itself). You’ll see that each “bucket” is assigned a different color, which shows up in tags, individual issue pages, and elsewhere.
Digital security in the mix.
The new design also properly highlights our work on the Digital Security Helpline, which is now given an entire section on the homepage. We’re proud to be running this vital resource, and we’re glad it’s getting the prominence it deserves.
A truly global perspective.
There are many ways the new accessnow.org displays our global perspective. Just this week we’ve featured blog posts on Tor being under threat in France, our testimony at the European Union, draconian social media legislation in Nigeria, U.S. President Obama’s call for comments on encryption, Women Hack Day in Tunis, a South African cybercrime bill, and more. Beyond that, our About page shows the true scope of our international staff and perspective.
We’ve reclaimed our name and revised our logo.
You may notice that we refer to ourselves as “Access Now” throughout the site; we’ve reclaimed our original name, and we’ve attempted to make the site as consistent as possible with that shift. We’ve also adjusted and refined our logo (can you spot the differences?).
This new site is the product of more than a year’s hard work by an amazing team. Sage constructed the bold, innovative theme from scratch, all while managing the intricacies of a complicated site migration. Digital agency Cornershop was a trusted partner, coding up Sage’s designs and building a smart administrative backend that perfectly suits our need to quickly post and feature new content. And we’re now hosted by Virtual Road, a hosting provider that cares as much about security, privacy, and free expression as we do. In addition, we’d still be stuck in wireframe-land with the help of Gertrude Nicole Friedman, Carolyn Tackett, Donna Wentworth, and many others.
We’re still making fixes, and we’ll always be refining the site both on the surface and under the hood. So please check it out and tell us what you think by sending a note to [email protected].