On August 22, 2012, AWP launched its new website with a redesigned look and expanded content for writers at every stage in their careers. As AWP’s physical offices packed up and moved from one state to another this year, the website provided a stable online presence and will continue to do so.

This year, we added content throughout our website, including:

• Over 2,000 positions in the Job List
• Over 980 grant/award/submission opportunities in the Writer’s Calendar
• 198 Writer’s News pieces (84 more than last year)
• 64 articles for writers, including 4 online-only exclusives, 3 career advice pieces, and 14 Writer’s Notebook blog pieces
• 22 podcast episodes (our 150^th episode was posted just a few weeks ago)
• 18 exclusive Q&As with featured presenters
• 13 members in the spotlight

Most of our website development has been hidden in the background this year, making changes to allow systems to run better and faster for everyone. We did our best to keep the site running smoothly so you wouldn’t even notice these upgrades.

But you might have seen some of the more visible additions we made. This year, one new page of our website allowed you to learn about and register for our 50^th Anniversary Gala event, held in Washington, DC. This fall, AWP added a new inclusion initiative and committee and posted exclusive content to help spark discussion along with a special issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. We added optional age and disability fields to My Conference Participant Information in your AWP account. Once we have representative samples for this data, we’ll release it annually along with the conference data on gender, race, and community participation. We also added two additional options to the gender field in the AWP account; if there is a gender with which you identify that you would like added, please let the AWP webmaster know.

In the upcoming year, we look forward to sharing with you exciting new resources and content. We have been collecting great submissions for our new #WritersServe directory, which will be searchable by many fields, just like other directories on our site, and full of information and photos of programs across the world where writers are making a difference in their communities. We will have more than a dozen new Web Series videos available just for AWP members on various subjects related to writing, editing, and publishing. Very soon, we also hope to have a brand new invoicing system that will tie our departments together and give organizations a way to easily access paid and outstanding invoices.

Speaking of finances, our move to the University of Maryland this year necessitated also moving our donation system. It was offline for a while, but it’s back up and running now at our new page on the University System of Maryland website. All funds still go straight to AWP’s services and endowments and donors will still be listed on the Friends of AWP page, so we hope you will continue to support us. Thank you to everyone who has done so already!

This year at #AWP17 in Washington, DC, some of you were kind enough to fill out a short website feedback survey to let us know how useful the AWP website was and what you’d like to see developed next. We have so many projects planned for the website in the future, such as building a more mobile-friendly and accessible version and making searches for jobs or opportunities more customizable. But we want to be sure we’re spending our time building what you really want and need. If you didn’t get a chance to fill out the feedback survey at the conference, feel free to send your website suggestions to webmaster@awpwriter.org.

It seems almost impossible for five years to have passed already. The site currently has over 84,000 registered users and its pages have been viewed more than 16,600,000 times since its redesign. Thank you for visiting the site and being a part of this worldwide writing community! We hope you return soon.