“You may ask yourself, why is the IGDA website so antiquated?
You may ask yourself, do they know they need to update their website?
You may ask yourself, will it launch or will it not?
But you may say to yourself today, oh wow, what have they done?!”
– Lyrics adapted from the song “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads (1981)

Greetings all,

Today the IGDA enters a new era of its online presence, and on behalf of myself and the leadership of the IGDA, I’d like to welcome you to the new IGDA.org!

The end product is the result of a phenomenal amount of effort over the past few months by the IGDA team – particularly your Operations Manager Tristin Hightower and her key volunteers Amanda d’Adesky, Michael Rader and Greg Hightower; our partners at YourMembership.com Ashley Hefflefinger and Christina Sansonetti; and our ongoing support team from Talley Management Group Eve Glowacki, Andy Hornstein, Joseph Sapp and Diann Furfaro.

Keeping in mind that the IGDA is an especially engaged and vocal community, I’d like to clarify a few things from the start:

What the new IGDA site IS:

• A great new platform for collaboration and information dissemination for our virtual, global community.
• An integrated website front-end and database back-end that will empower us to be more efficient and more accurate with our transactions.
• A new, clean design we hope you’ll appreciate; we feel it maintains a good aesthetic for our professional association.
• A web presence solution that we hope to see remain in place for a long while.

What the new IGDA site IS NOT:

• Perfect; this site will do much of what the IGDA needs it to do on a daily, ongoing basis. However it will not have every ideal feature and it will not satisfy everyone’s wish list.
• Complete; there is much yet to be done, and what you’re seeing today is only the launch mode with the fundamental content in place. Tristin and I, along with Chapter and SIG leaders, will be hard at work for weeks/months continuing to add to and refine the content. And we’d still like to integrate the current WordPress-based sites such as the IGDA Foundation and IGDA Scholars. It’s also reasonable to expect us to make UI and design tweaks over the coming months.
• Wiki inclusive; the launch site does not integrate all the content on the IGDA Wiki, however, we will be working on whether and/or how that site gets updated and/or migrated.

We fully realize that the old site’s various technical issues led to a migration of Chapters and SIGs to various other web platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. We’re sincerely hoping that over time, all these groups will come back home to IGDA.org and take advantage of the many new features available, such as easily emailing your groups, holding elections, having group forums, setting up events (and having the events appear on a master IGDA global calendar) and so on. For now, every IGDA Chapter and SIG will at least have a basic descriptive page on the new site. And at some point after launch, we’ll be implementing new “at a glance” pages so members can view every IGDA group’s recent, ongoing and planned activities.

Over the coming days and weeks, we will be communicating with content stakeholders on getting trained on the new website’s system and on the strategies for how we’ll move ahead. For now, we of course welcome your constructive feedback on phase 1 of the new site by using this web form, and we hope you’ll take advantage of its features.

Welcome back to IGDA.org!

Kate