Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

(If that's a meaningless reference for you, have a click over. A little vintage Bowie, and with a sharp adultism callout, no less, is always good for the soul. And it's his 67th birthday today!)

Over the next few days, you'll notice some changes on the site. We are finally finishing the process of some design tweaks, and a pretty major reorganization of our static content on the site. Yippee! Myself, the volunteers, Casey, our badass developer, and Isabella Rotman, our snazzy artist-in-residence, have all had many conversations and brainstorming sessions to figure out the changes we wanted to make and felt best about when it comes to what we do, how we do it, what works best with our general ethos and the way we conceptualize comprehensive sex education, and how we want to grow from here, as well as what we feel will be most clear, comfortable useful for our users.

We hope everyone will be as excited about what we have come up with as we are!

Some sections we've had here for a long time, but which have not really been working for us for a while, are going buh-bye. Other sections are being expanded or shifted, and there are some new sections, too. We are making changes to the titles or sections with some just to make things more clear, and with others, the change is conceptual. For instance, our choice to put all things gender in one place, rather than trying to separate things into just two genders when there are more than two, and the lines between are often hazy or arbitrary; or our choice to give pregnancy and parenting its own section, moving things like contraception and pregnancy scare content elsewhere so we can make room to create and feature more content that is actually about pregnancy, pregnancy choices and supporting teen or young adult parents.

While we finish this, please pardon our dust. There will be at least a few days where everything isn't yet in the right place. We are able to mass migrate some of our content to where it should go, but we have a considerable amount of content we'll need to move piece by piece manually. Given the volume of content we have produced, it's a big job. The same goes for some content on the site which maps out how to use it, which we are also in the process of updating as we make these other changes. We will be doing our level best to get everything sorted as quickly as possible.

So, what's new?

If you are reading this and the changes are not live yet, when you peek at our primary navigation up there on the top right, you will see, or would have seen, the following categories:

  • Skin Deep (Bodies/Anatomy)
  • Sexyouality (Sexuality)
  • Take Two (Relationships)
  • Infection Section (STIs, STDs and Testing/Treatment)
  • Gaydar (LGBTQ)
  • Pink Slip (Girl stuff)
  • Boyfriend (Guy Stuff)
  • Repro Depot (Reproduction, Pregnancy, Contraception)
  • Crisis Hotline (Abuse, Assault and other crisis issues)
  • Sexual Politics (Sexual Politics)
  • IYOW (In Your Own Words: user/young person-written content)
  • Questions and Answers (The advice columns)
  • Find a Doc (Our international searchable database of in-person help services)
  • Etc.
  • Message Boards

Shortly -- or already, depending on when you are reading this -- it's going to, instead, look like this, in a very simple, clear font without any additional graphics:

  • Bodies (Bodies and anatomy)
  • Gender (All and anything gender-related or gender-specific)
  • Sexual Identity (LGBTQA, but also things like alternative relationship models or kink that some people experience as part of their sexual identity)
  • Relationships (What it says)
  • Sex & Sexuality (Again, just what it says)
  • Sexual Health (STIs, safer sex, birth control, healthcare and other sexual health issues)
  • Pregnancy and Parenting (Pregnancy and all the pregnancy options, including parenting)
  • Abuse & Assault (Sexual abuse, assault and other kinds of interpersonal violence, as well as help with healing)
  • Sexual Politics (What it says.)
  • In Your Own Words (User/young person-written content)
  • Questions & Answers (The advice columns)
  • Et Cetera (A place for all the things that do not quite fit anywhere else)
  • Help Near You (Our international searchable database of in-person help services)
  • Message Boards

Speaking of looks, we also removed some additional, and unnecessary navigation near the top left, and have changed article indexes so they just have a clear header at top, with some gorgeously fun illustrations from Izzy, like this one:

sexual health

(What was in that removed navigation square that matters is the link to external resources online: to other sites by topic. You will now find a list of those in each section index, underneath the box we already had, and still do, for related polls, blog entries and advice columns.)

Izzy also made us a sweet new little button for folks to click to donate. In addition, we are still in the midst of working on a new, far more dynamic way, to do and present our polls on the front page, and are doing a tiny bit of moving things about with our social media on the front page to make it work a bit better.

As mentioned, we also very much want to create or publish more content supportive of teen or young adult parents. If you are someone who would like to write some of that content, please drop us a line! We'd love to have that be a space where most of what is written for young parents comes from folks who have also been there themselves. While our budget remains slim, we always aim to be supportive of young parents, and understand the additional financial challenges you/they face, so we would offer a modest payment for those pieces.

If you've got any questions about how to use the site or where to find anything, per usual, feel free to either leave a comment here or drop an email and we will get back to you soon.