Welcome to the MAS’ New Website

Yoosuf, Abby, Emma, Nicholas and Anette at Comet Ping Pong (Yes, that Comet Ping Pong. I checked – no basement.)

Welcome to the new Microanalysis Society website.  Our previous site was 10 years old and had served us well but it was time to move on.  The web had changed.  More people are accessing sites from their mobile devices.  Secure HTTP (HTTPS://) has gone from being a nicety to a requirement.  There are the new European privacy requirements.  Finally, only a few people understood the Plone content management system that we used to administer the old site and the host company was getting unreliable.  For these and many other reasons, it was time to move on.

So welcome! Here we are. Thanks to the hard work of the Computer Activities Committee, we have a entirely new website.  Anette von der Handt, Emma Bullock, Yoosuf Picard, Abigail Lindstrom and Nicholas Ritchie got together at the Carnegie Institute of Washington for a weekend of intense weekend of website development (and a beer or two.)  During two long days of effort over 100 pages of content were ported from the old site to the new.  We carried over the important relationships with our Affiliated Regional Societies and the International Societies.  We carried over our formative documents. We carried over our society awards and the winners.  We carried over the event calendar.  We added some new content too.  There are new resources pages.

But we aren’t finished. The new site will continue to evolve over time to reflect the changing needs of the MAS membership. To that end, we encourage suggestions for new features and improved functionality.

In designing the new site, we tried to focus the needs of the membership.  We designed the navigation to bring forward the most used and useful parts of the site.  Now we can keep track of the numbers of people (anonymously) visiting the site and the pages they visit.  Try the site on your smart phone or tablet. Now that more people are accessing the web through mobile devices, it was important that the site will automatically reformat to fit your device.  Dan Ruscitto and the Social Media Committee is reinvigorating our Society’s social media presence.  Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/MicrobeamSoc) or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/microbeamanalysis).  How can we serve you better?

As the members of a great, member driven society, this is our site. It becomes richer and more useful when we the members submit content. Send us your microanalysis-related images, articles and links of interest.  Together we can make the MAS a better, stronger and more vigorous professional society. Onward and upward!

Nicholas, Anette, Emma, Yoosuf & Abby
The MAS Computer Activities Committee