Publication Date

October 23, 2024

Perspectives Section

AHA Activities, Behind the Scenes at the AHA, Perspectives Daily

An organization’s website is its most important digital resource. Since the 1990s, the AHA website has served as a compendium for the historical discipline, featuring resources for teaching and learning, professional standards and guidelines for the discipline, and key publications. But as time marches on, innovations and improvements in website design and development require careful thought and consideration to make a website easy to use.

In 2022, we decided it was time to begin the lengthy and complicated process of redesigning the AHA website. At the time, the site consisted of tens of thousands of pages. It included many useful resources, but some were spread across the site in ways that made them difficult to find, while others were decades old and required updates.

The first step was drafting a request for proposals (RFP), laying out what we liked and didn’t like about our current site, and our goals and challenges for creating a new one. We tried to be as transparent as possible with issues that a website vendor would face in redesigning and migrating the current site. Next, we released the RFP to website agencies, most recommended by partner organizations. Interestingly, every proposal we received recommended moving to WordPress, a popular website content management system (CMS) that offers a flexible and accessible platform. Following interviews with the finalists, we selected Yoko Co, a web agency that came highly recommended—and most importantly, had a team that was clear-eyed about both the challenges and opportunities presented by the project.

Yoko Co began by interviewing AHA members and Council members about the current site and what they hoped to see in a redesigned site. Based on the conversations with staff and members, Yoko Co recommended an updated site structure and created a mood board, page designs, and wireframes for review and feedback. The project was incredibly collaborative, with Yoko Co incorporating comments from staff, Council members, and other stakeholders to build a site that would meet our goals—not only at launch, but a site that would help us be creative and build resources far into the future.

Yoko Co also completed a “site audit,” creating a massive spreadsheet (initially 40,000 rows) of every single page on the site. Staff decided which pages needed to be updated, migrated as is, or deleted (these mostly had a time-sensitive component and would be of no use years later). This culling reduced the site to 20,000 pages, about half of which were Perspectives articles that would be migrated as is. The remainder—including educational and professional resources and information about past and current AHA initiatives—we reviewed closely. In some cases, the content required no changes; in others, we consolidated pages and revised based on current historiography and best practices. The most fun part was reviewing thousands of photographs taken by Marc Monaghan, who has photographed the annual meeting since 2012, to choose images for the new site. The joy on attendees’ faces in these photos helped us focus on the project’s primary goal: supporting the historical community.

Once Yoko Co built the site in WordPress, AHA staff jumped right in and began uploading content, including hundreds of photos and over 1,200 pages in the Resource Library. The site launched quietly in mid-June, as we knew that there was still content to add or update and that we would find bugs. But by the fall, we had worked through any remaining issues and finalized most content.

We hope you will take time to explore the revamped historians.org and share any feedback. We continue to make improvements and add new content. And if you or your organization have questions about redesigning a website, I’m more than happy to chat. The website—though an important resource—is just one of the many ways the AHA strives to support the historical community.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.

Alex Levy
Alexandra F. Levy

American Historical Association