By Phil Young, SCASP Webmaster
If you have visited scaspweb.org recently, you have probably noticed it looks brand new. Over the past several weeks I rebuilt our website from the ground up, and I want to share why we made the change and what it means for you.
For years our website and membership system ran on Wild Apricot. It did what we needed, but the subscription kept getting more expensive as our membership grew. Moving to WordPress lets us keep everything Wild Apricot gave us, including membership management, conference registration, our FAST SCASP newsletter, and the job board. At the same time, it cuts our yearly cost by a wide margin. For an organization our size that is real money, and all of it goes back into serving school psychologists across South Carolina.
Saving money was the biggest reason, but it was not the only one. WordPress gives us more control over how the site looks and works, and the site is genuinely ours. Pages load faster, everything works better on a phone, and we can update it ourselves as our needs change.
I also want to be share about how I got this done without it taking all year. I used Claude, from Anthropic, to help me through the process. It assisted with designing the new pages, moving our content and member records over, setting up the tools that handle payments and registration, and working through the problems that came up along the way. Work that would have taken many months came together in far less time. The power of the latest ai tools is amazing. I know it shapes my work and I am very curious to hear how others are using ai in their work.
One of the best parts of the new site is that you can now leave comments on posts like this one. We would really like to hear from you. What would make this website more useful for you? Are there resources, tools, or information you wish we offered? Share your ideas in the comments below, and I (and Claude) will do my best to build them in.
Take a look around, and if you find anything that needs fixing, let me know. This is our online home, and I want it to work well for everyone.
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