Kristina Ciari Tursi
We launched on Monday (May 5) with great anticipation from our members and community at large. While our new site isn't perfect for everyone, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We have a few bugs, which is to be expected with anything new, and we are really happy with our new home. We appreciate your continued patience and support as we settle in and make ourselves at home.
In case you missed it, you can read our Welcome to our New Website blog to learn about our project plan and scope and where we'd like to go in the future, understand any changes to your membership, why you need to change your password to login, and why we didn't copy your credit card information from the old site, and you can read an entertaining story about why we think the new website is like the best jacket you'll ever own.
Website traffic & Site speed
Our first day saw site traffic 5x our normal rate. Here, take a look:
In addition to the huge site load, our web service provider temporarily cut off our "reset password" emails so our members weren't receiving instructions to reset. We fixed the problem in a matter of hours, and over 1,000 of our members were able to successfully login to the new site in our first 12-hours.
To meet growing demand, we have beefed up our servers. Many of you noted the slow response time of the site on Monday, and we hope you've notice the speediness we have now - with even more coming in the future.
In addition to being overloaded on our website, we were inundated (understandably) with requests to info@mountaineers.org and phone calls to our program centers. We put extra people on the phones and computers to answer you just as soon as we could. We answered over 1,000 emails and we're mostly caught up now. We are prioritizing remaining issues based on urgency and order received.
Password Reset
Initially our password reset request was case sensitive. Clearly this was an issue for many, as we didn't have clear-enough instructions on the "reset password" page and lots of you had trouble. Sorry about that.
We have now fixed the password request and it is case IN-sensitive. Go ahead and capitalize your name however you wish!
If you continue to have log-in issues we may have a problem with your name or password in our system. Email info@mountaineers.org and let us know, and we can fix that for you. We are prioritizing these as the highest among our requests. We take immediate action where we can, and long term suggestions or general feedback go on our Future Website Enhancements list, which will continue to be updated as we grow and evolve.
Courses & Activities
Initially you could only see courses and activities which were open for registration. We fixed this to show all of our courses and activities, not just those open for registration. We now have a toggle button option if you only want to see only those open for registration.
Additionally, we've found bugs and have worked through a number of course issues. We've addressed problems with basic climbing, scrambling, first aid, and our naturalist courses. We continue to work with photography and the conditioning hiking series.
To access all of your courses and activities, the easiest way is to visit the My Profile page, and click on the "My Activities" and "My Courses" tab. Keep in mind if an activity is part of a course, it will be listed under the "My Courses" tab. You can also use My Profile to pay your dues, change your membership type, edit your personal information, and create a profile for other members to learn more about you and what you've done with The Mountaineers.
Carpooling
The Mountaineers still supports carpooling, and we realize the carpooling functionality has changed and is a pain point for some of you. We apologize and hope the new system becomes easier for you to use.
To make sure your information is easy to find for carpooling, please be sure to go to the 'My Preferences' tab on My Profile and un-select the 'Make my profile private' checkbox. This will allow other members (only members, not the general public) to see your contact information to arrange carpools. We also encourage you to update your profile to say "I love to carpool" at the top of your bio so everyone can see.
Eventually, we'd like to create some sort of an icon on people's profiles to indicate they are interested in carpooling.
Historical Information
All of your course history will be imported over the next few months. Your badges now serve as prerequisites to allow you to register for courses as you see fit.
We do not plan to bring over trip reports, but if you have a specific one in mind you'd like to see we can get that to you.
Launch Partners
To launch the new site, we partnered with Percolator Consulting and the Jazkarta development team. We also worked with graphic designer Neal Maher and user experience expert Darrell Houle. Our partnership was top notch, and we cannot thank them enough for their long nights and hard work!
For a general overview on the project from Percolator's point of view, read Karen Uffelman's blog post about the project.
For a more specific view on the "tech nerd" parts of our project, read Sally Kleinfeldt's overview on our technology platforms and partnerships.
Questions or Feedback?
If you have further questions about our project, please read up on our new website blog. It's full of information about where we came from, where we're going, and what's new and different.
If you have feedback, send an email to our Member Services Team at info@mountaineers.org. We will address issues in the order of priority and in the order received.
Thanks again for all your support!
