It has been four years since AWP redesigned its website to highlight and expand content for the thousands of writers and writing professionals who visit the site every day. Discover the past year’s special features and what’s in store for the future of the website.

Plenty of new content was added this year:

• Over 2,400 positions in the Job List
• Over 900 grant/award/submission opportunities in the Writer’s Calendar
• 65 articles for writers, including 4 online-only exclusives, 6 career advice pieces, and 13 Writer’s Notebook blog pieces
• 114 Writer’s News pieces
• 40 podcast episodes (25 more than last year)
• 13 members in the spotlight

For the first time ever, we opened up our entire site for one weekend to writers who wanted to find out what AWP had to offer. Our preview weekend was a great success with hundreds of participants, and we appreciated hearing what many participants enjoyed most about the website. Afterward, some of the participants decided to join and become part of this greater community of writers—welcome!

Our popular Writer to Writer Mentorship Program section got an overhaul, making it easier for mentors and mentees to submit applications and for interested members to see what impact the program has had on past participants. We appreciate the reflections they shared with us.

The Writer’s News now rounds up additional news items and features them all at once on Fridays. This allows us to keep writers informed about an even greater number of issues throughout the year. Want even more news? Some news appears exclusively in our enewsletters. And, speaking of the enewsletters, starting in January we changed their format in several ways; they are now sent out twice monthly so members can be better informed about the literary world and AWP.

It was another big year for our media as we changed the format of our Videos page, which now features 50 videos from our previous four conferences as well as a drop-down box that organizes them by year. We celebrated our 100^th podcast episode this year and are still going strong. We spotlighted new schools in our Campus Visit Video Series. We also finished the photo galleries for our 2013, 2014, and 2015 conferences. Our Writer’s Chronicle issue pages got images as well; we went through all of our issues in the archive to add as many cover and author thumbnail images as possible. This gave our readers a more pleasant experience when deciding which of our articles to read first. Want even more AWP-related images? Follow us on Pinterest.

If you were involved with a conference proposal this year, you might have already noticed we added a new section to My AWP Account for Conference Participant Information. Now there is no need to go through your Directory of Members profile looking for the sections specific to conference events; everything is all on one page. And thanks to the many participants who chose to disclose their genders and ethnicities this year, we had a statistically significant sample of the conference’s diversity! This allowed us to finally be able to share this information in the aggregate, painting a more complete picture about the individuals and communities participating in our annual conference.

Another addition to My AWP Account this year was the More Benefits page. Here, we display special offers from some of our partners, specifically for AWP website users and sometimes exclusively for AWP members. Right now, our members are able to use the page to generate a unique code for a free domain name and website through .ink to showcase their writing.

The new conference Event Proposals section makes it much easier for you to learn what it takes to submit a good proposal to our annual conference. You can read through the Proposal Guidelines and Presenter Guidelines, learn more about How Events Are Selected, and meet the Subcommittee members who read through the submissions. We have also expanded our conference’s Accessibility Services page to more thoroughly describe the services offered, give you information about the venues, and help you get in touch with us if there are additional services you require. New checkboxes on conference registration items in our store helped us keep track of attendees who requested services at our conference, so we could follow up and make sure their needs were met. Wondering where the Accepted Events listing went? It is now part of the Schedule page until the full schedule goes live in October.

Save yourself postage fees and many clicks! You can now find nearly all of our publication submissions and contests in a single place: AWP’s Submittable portal. We are especially interested in good career advice pieces right now (hint, hint).

Everyone needs a good checklist to help keep them on track. So we created interactive checklists for our program directors and program administrators to help them manage their writing program information, for bookfair exhibitors to help them manage their exhibit spaces, and for conference sponsors to help them manage their sponsorships. We also have a brand new, informative page about sponsorship.

We built a new interface for our annual #GivingTuesday campaign, and now we have a dynamic Friends of AWP page that is constantly up-to-date with a listing of generous individuals who help support our endowed and nonendowed programs and initiatives.

Looking for our tweet chats? AWP staff hosts a live chat on Twitter almost every month (occasionally two a month). We answered your questions about the AWP Conference & Bookfair and moderated discussion about the pros and cons of getting an MFA. We shared tricks for submitting to AWP’s publications and contests and showcased many wonderful Writer’s Conferences and Centers. Our website even had its own tweet chat this past year! We moved the Tweet Chat Archive to the Community & Calendar section of our site to make it easier for you to find. Even if you are not on Twitter, you can read through the transcripts of all of our past chats are available there.

With all the improvements this year and in previous years, it might seem as though the AWP website is as complete as it needs to be, right? Not quite! We are constantly making small updates and fixes (too numerous to mention) to both copy and functionality to make it run as smoothly as possible. But we also have big plans for the year ahead.

We are working on features that will help us enhance and personalize your experience on the site. This will include new member badges, additional search options, recategorized content, and helpful functionality. Several large areas on our backend still need to be developed so that AWP staff can be able to assist you more quickly and thoroughly.

2017 marks AWP’s 50^th anniversary, and we are planning to highlight content honoring AWP’s long history of helping writers and the individuals who helped build this literary community. We will also have an exciting new event: a gala at the Conference & Bookfair. Information and tickets will be available on the website soon. We hope that you will join us to celebrate our 50^th year as an organization and help us determine which direction to go for the future.

The web services staff would like to thank you for being one of more than 330,000 visitors to our website this year! Come back any time. And if there is there something you would like to see on the website, please email webmaster@awpwriter.org with your suggestion.