Website Launch

All,

I am very pleased to announce the launch of the brand new NYCAGO website. This has been a goal of the chapter for the better part of a decade, dating back to our previous webmaster, the late Steven Lawson, who had been lobbying for a website overhaul prior to his passing in August 2018. When I took over for him, I felt a great duty to ensure that our website continued to be an invaluable resource for the NYCAGO. Part of that involved working to bring our website up to par with modern web development standards so that it could continue to be a useful resource in the years and decades to come.

Of course, this involves two precious resources: time and money. I am incredibly grateful to have had the full support of the Executive Board who entrusted me with managing this project, as well as for their serious financial support.

The goals of this new website are two-fold:

1. To create a dynamic website that is visually modern, easy to navigate and update, removes content redundancies in our legacy site, and is viewable on a wide variety of devices (desktop, mobile, etc.)

2. To serve as an archive of all NYCAGO activities and posts. Until now, posts and updates on the website permanently disappeared from our homepage once a new update was posted. Now, as we update, posts will be forever captured in a post archive for later viewing

The new website you see here was designed and implemented by Alison Cheeseman of Birdhive Development & Design. We engaged Alison not only due to her experience designing websites for organizations in our field (such as the website of Saint Thomas Church), but also for her obvious deep passion for the arts, being an accomplished vocalist herself. She has been an absolute joy to work with and I cannot thank her enough for her relentless dedication to making this project come to life.

Behind the scenes, Alison has also been hard at work on an overhaul and redesign of the New York City Organ Project. That work is still underway, so for now you will see the legacy database still live, but once completed in 2024 we will have a database that is easier to navigate and better-prepared to preserve and update in perpetuity. That work is being funded with generous support from the Centennial Millennium Fund.

Please take a look around. This website is meant to be a living, breathing entity which will continue to be iterated and improved upon. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, or suggestions, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. The goal is for this to be a resource that we all love.

Thank you again to those who were involved in making this happen and I am as excited as ever for the future of the NYCAGO.

Best,
Sam Bartlett, Webmaster & Concert Calendar Editor