You may have heard that a new www.cohousing.org website is on its way. The website is a central part of the services The Cohousing Association of the US offers. As a clearinghouse of information and connecter of people and communities, our website is one of our most effective tools for doing what we do.

The new website will be even more effective at bringing community together in several ways. The new look will be more inviting, attracting more people to learn about and fall in love with cohousing. We’re adding new content about the hows and whys of cohousing. Improved navigation and organization will make it easier to find what you are looking for while still inviting you to unexpected gems.

Our website has been gathering content from dozens of contributors for over a decade and as a result, there is a lot of great stuff there. It makes sense that over time the content would outpace the organizational structure, which is what has happened. At the same time, it is a huge job to create a new structure that will make so much content easily accessible.

If you’ve been following this project, you know we’ve been working on it for several months now. We started with a complete redesign, taking time to consider how we wanted the new site to look and to function. Once we had some basic layout concepts, we hired a graphic designer to create beautiful page designs for our top level pages and templates for other pages. We are very pleased with her work and look forward to sharing the new designs.

From there we have hired a website developer who is in the process of turning the designs into actual pages. As you might expect there have been a few hiccups and things have taken a bit longer than we had hoped, but overall things are progressing nicely.

We’re looking forward to giving you a sneak peek at the new site during Monday’s Webinar. We’ll be sharing a couple of favorite pages from the new site, which we expect to roll out early in 2019. (If you haven’t registered for the Webinar yet, you can do so at https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JA-ZHp2jRqy-DypZAmti-A)

As we get the initial structure in place, we’re ready to ask for more help from all of you. Our biggest need right now is for photos of less commonly photographed cohousing subjects. We have plenty of photos of common meals, holidays, concerts and parties. We could use photos of the things we don’t think to take pictures of, like the ways we help each other in community, budgeting process, and work days to name a few. As you go about living in cohousing, consider snapping some pictures from the perspective of a journalist documenting this way of living for those who are not familiar. Send photos to karencohous@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing what community looks like where you live.

As always, we welcome your cohousing stories and advice. Blog content can be submitted by email to karencohous@gmail.com. We’ll gladly add quality content to our current site and transfer it over to the new site when it’s ready.