SSP Launches New Website

By Christine Orr, Ringgold, Inc., Communications Committee Member — The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) announces the redesign and launch of its new website, accessible at www.sspnet.org.

Easier navigation, a cleaner design, and more streamlined event registration and login procedures as well as a more friendly user interface were the driving forces for the redesign.

“We are very excited to reveal the redesigned site. Our goal is to more efficiently serve the needs of our members and those of the international scholarly communication community and to reflect the vibrancy, openness, and diversity of SSP,” SSP President Carol Anne Meyer stated.

“The new site is much more flexible, and surfaces important content, discussions, and activities that are happening in this dynamic society,” she continued. “Volunteers, including Task Force Leaders Anne Orens, Rebecca McLeod, and Tony Alves worked closely with our Resource Center for Associations staff and Windmill Design to make this happen.”

Divided into key sections of EVENTS, CAREERS, COMMUNITY, and RESOURCES, the site presents a wealth of content to SSP members and professionals looking to explore a career in scholarly publishing. Easy access to members-only areas is found via the COMMUNITY section, and the popular job listings – from publishers around the globe – are rapidly accessible under CAREERS.

A key feature of the new website is the expanded SSP Library, containing more than five years of past material from SSP Annual Meetings, IN Conferences, webinars, and more. Now fully searchable by presenter name, topic/keyword, and year, the SSP Library offers members and visitors case studies, lessons learned, and industry forecasts captured in video, audio, and slides shows. The SSP Library is found in the RESOURCES section.

Broad social sharing is another major addition, via embedded social media links throughout the SSP site. Whether users prefer to share content via Twitter, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Facebook, or any other of dozens of channels, they can do so via the Share button located on each page.

The SSP Website Task Force was the driving force behind this redesign and was made up of representatives from multiple SSP committees, including Education, Annual Meeting Program, Development, and Communications. This engagement by key groups helped to ensure that the site’s new and updated content would be highly relevant.

“Launching a new website was a huge team effort with much of the work done by Ruth Gleason Roth and Linda Pocsik from the Resource Center and Lois Smith and Michael Mozina, cochairs of the Communications Committee.” said Rebecca McLeod and Tony Alves, Task Force cochairs. “Windmill was also a dream vendor. It truly took a village for the website to come to fruition.”