After Our Redesign: Here’s What To Expect
In the startup world, a site’s first users are called ‘Early Adopters’. We want to thank each of you for being early adopters of Plants Map. We appreciate all of your support and for sharing #plantsmap on social media. You have contributed hundreds of ideas in hours of conversations, emails, and meetings. You have helped us keep the site up and running by purchasing thousands of tags and signs. And in just one year, you created almost 15,000 web pages for your plants!
We knew we were outgrowing our startup website quickly and so last December, we began a total redesign of PlantsMap.com. Our first goal with the redesign was to make the site much easier to use. Our second goal was to build a new site where once it was launched, we could quickly add new features to support the continued growth of Plants Map.
There are a few items we need to draw your attention to that are different with our new Plants Map website. Some elements of the previous website are temporarily suspended for a short period of time, some functions you are used to are different and you may want to update some portions of your profile or organization pages.
Individual & Organization Profiles
A major change is the request to be able to have one sign in with the ability to act as multiple profiles. Your main sign in is your individual, personal profile seen as ‘My Profile’ within the top drop down menu. You can then add and manage additional profiles created for organizations with that same sign in. From the top right drop down menu choose either ‘My Profile’ or one of your organization profiles to act as that profile and manage plants and collections.
URLS & Links
The structure of the URLs on the site has changed. If you linked to Plants Map from your website or blog, you will need to check for the new links and update your site.
Profile Cover Photos
We redesigned both individual and organization profiles giving them both a new round cover photo. You may want to edit your profile and organization profile to adjust the photo or replace with another one that fits the new profile design format.
Photos
Photos that have been added to plant profiles will all move over with the new website. However, we reworked how plants are organized and renamed Gardens and Collections into Collections and Subcollections. Photos that were added to a garden or collection slide show or photo gallery on the old site will be turned off temporarily at launch. We have a copy of all of your garden and collection photos. Once the new site is live, we’ll check that everything is working properly and then turn the slide show feature back on and your photos will return.
Map Layers
Again, related to the work we did to build the new plant organization tools, we are going to leave the pin layers turned off on maps for the launch and then turn them on this week after we check everything. We will be making the pins smaller too. For the launch, you will find only one type of pin on each of your personal maps and later this week pins will return showing your collections, subcollections, plants, trails, and networked connections. You will see that all user profiles have the ability now to create maps of their collections and subcollections.
Text Editor
The conversion from the old text editing tool to the new one may require you to adjust some formatting and paragraph breaks with your plant stories, profile bio, and descriptions for your collections. Here’s a perfect opportunity to update your profile.
We will continue to share updates with you from our Journal and via emails. More new features coming soon.
For more details on our changes see our Journal: Plants Map Redesign Coming June 9, 2015
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