Website Update (December 28, 2018)

A significant, site-wide update was published to the IWDW website over the holidays in order to apply a new "responsive web design" (RWD) framework, which consists primarily of updates and additions to the HTML, CSS, and in some cases the Javascript components of the site. This update is intended to help the web pages and tools render more fluidly and "responsively" across all devices, including widescreen desktop monitors, laptop displays, tablets, and phones. Pages with simpler, more text-based content are the easiest to migrate to a responsive design, whereas tools with a more complex user interface can be much more difficult to migrate. So, this first website update is intended to lay the functional groundwork for the overall RWD framework to be put in place and individual tools will continue to be migrated over time according to priority and complexity. Basically, you can expect the "look and feel" of the site to change slightly and to (hopefully) behave more fluidly across all types of devices, but overall any noticeable changes to individual pages and tools should be relatively minor. The IWDW Home page is one notable exception, and has been significantly revamped to take advantage of some new design elements and techniques, as well as to add an "image carousel" of photos taken in western Federal Class I areas.

Navigational Changes

The navigation structure of the website has also been updated, which you can see most prominently reflected in the dropdown menus of the top menu bar. These changes are intended to better reflect the evolving nature of the ever-growing collection of pages, tools, documents that have been added to the Warehouse over time, and are meant to provide some important improvements and revisions to the navigation structure that was initially put in place before much content was available. We've tried to make these changes as intuitive and "low impact" as possible, but if you're having difficulty reconciling the new structure with your memories (or bookmarks) of the previous structure, a good place to get an overall view of the new navigation is the IWDW Site Map, which shows all the primary pages in a very simple layout. We've also attempted to "redirect" and preserve as-is the URL addresses of as many resources as possible so that your previous bookmarks and embedded document links will continue to work as before, but if you receive a Page Not Found error when trying to access anything, please let us know so that we can repair the problematic link(s) as soon as possible.