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A New Homepage, Highlighting Our Articles

July 29th, 2020 by Alex Zorach

We have freshly redesigned our homepage! The new page features recently updated plant articles, ecoregion articles, and ID/comparison guides, and a table of contents to navigate them.
A screenshot of the new homepage.

The aim of the redesign is to highlight recent changes to the site, including newly published and updated material. The goal is both to make the material more accessible, and to show how actively the site is being developed and how much unique material can be found here.

Lately, the material has been updated frequently, sometimes daily and certainly weekly. If you check the homepage often, you will see just how much progress is being made.

Behind-The-Scenes Improvements

The changes to the homepage utilize some groundwork that has other benefits. One of them is improving the system for cropping images, which enables a snippet to be more easily included in material that is shared on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

A screenshot of the new image format as being displayed on Facebook when sharing a plant article.

Prior to these changes, some of the site's images would display gracefully when articles were shared, but others would be awkwardly cropped or shown at a low resolution. Now, articles have a consistent crop dimension which is optimal for sharing, and which is chosen manually to display nicely. All new articles will use the new system, and it is just a matter of a few days before all older articles are moved to the new system.

We hope that improving the shareability of our articles can help our educational material reach a broader audience through social media.

Please consider supporting us!

This site is currently supprted 100% by user donations, which help ensure that the site can continue to be developed. We currently have relatively few donors, so even small donations can make a big difference. Please read our FAQ if you have any questions about giving, or just go to donate on Liberapay. You can always find these links in our site's footer!

Archive of All Blogs

Range Map & Taxonomic Update Progress, January 31st, 2024

Giving Thanks To Everyone We Rely On, November 22nd, 2023

Thinking More Deeply About Habitat, April 5th, 2023

2022 Year-End Summary: Successes & New Goals, February 15th, 2023

New Databases Linked: Flora of North America & NatureServe Explorer, November 11th, 2022

All Range Maps 2nd Generation, Taxonomic Updates, & Fundraising Goal Met!, September 29th, 2022

More Range Map Improvements, POWO Interlinking, And Notes Fields, June 7th, 2022

Ecoregion-Based Plant Lists and Search, March 30th, 2022

Progress Updates on Range Maps and More, February 10th, 2022

The Vision for bplant.org, December 9th, 2021

New Server: Software & Hardware, August 30th, 2021

More & Improved Plant Range Maps, July 19th, 2021

A Control Section for Invasive Plants, April 15th, 2021

Progress Bars & State Ecoregion Legends, March 11th, 2021

Our 2020 Achievements, February 9th, 2021

Interlinking Databases for Plant Research, November 11th, 2020

A New Homepage, Highlighting Our Articles, July 29th, 2020

A False Recovery, But North Carolina's Ecoregions are Complete!, June 9th, 2020

We're Back After COVID-19 Setbacks, April 3rd, 2020

Help Us Find Ecoregion Photos, February 27th, 2020

What We Achieved in 2019, December 30th, 2019

Plant Comparison and ID Guides, October 30th, 2019

We Are Now Accepting Donations, October 14th, 2019

US State Ecoregion Maps, New Footer, Ecoregion Article Progress, and References, September 19th, 2019

Tentative Range Maps of Native Plants, August 12th, 2019

Ecoregion Locator and Interactive Maps, July 10th, 2019

Using Ecoregions Over Political Boundaries, May 13th, 2019

How We Handle Wild vs Cultivated Plants, April 16th, 2019

A Blog To Keep People Updated On Our Progress, April 8th, 2019

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