ASHAWire—home to the ASHA journals, Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, and The ASHA Leader newsmagazine—is all new as of December 18. There’s no substitute for actually using a web portal like ASHAWire, but our goal in this post is to give a bit of background for the change and a few key differences between the new ASHAWire and what you’ve come to expect from the original that was launched in 2014.
Updated Home Page
The first thing you’ll likely notice about ASHAWire is the refreshed design. The new design puts articles more front and center. The tabbed section at the top of the page, for example, provides easy access to a few recent ASHA Leader feature articles, articles from recent special issues and forums in the journals and Perspectives, and other articles of interest across a range of topics and types of research.
Articles are prominently featured as well in a section featuring Most Recent and Most Read works. The Most Read section will update automatically each day based on usage data from the previous day, and Most Recent will automatically update as new articles across all of the publications are released.
Next to this section is a Trending Research list that highlights articles for which there is significant buzz developing. Look to this section as well when there are major advocacy campaigns under way… one of our aims here is to make the home page a more dynamic and relevant location, key to maximizing the visibility and use of research.
The new home page for ASHAWire also features an Announcements section and a section of quick links to important resources for authors, reviewers, and librarians (with more to come). Ending the page is a set of quick links out to the latest issue of the individual publications on ASHAWire.
Article Page Design
The design refresh extends all the way through the site, with the article page redevelopment having been especially focused on to give readers easier access to key details and ready access to the references, tables, and figures, no matter where the reader is in an article. We focused as well on the overall readability, from fonts to better navigation of sections.
Over the next few months we’ll also be rolling out some additional functionality that you’ll see at the article level, so stay tuned!
Perspectives Redesign
With Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups becoming a scholarly review journal on January 1, we took advantage of the site rebuilding opportunity to make Perspectives what we have been wanting it to be but had been unable to achieve in our former design. Perspectives will soon be shifting to a much more conventional format, with bimonthly issues in which the issue’s Table of Contents features a section for any SIG publishing in that issue.
Other sections of the Perspectives home page are structured with the same goal of giving greater visibility to the articles. We have an exciting development under way now as well that will, in the coming months, provide direct links to SIG-specific home pages. These home pages will each feature feeds of articles from the individual SIG, along with feeds of topically relevant articles from other publications on ASHAWire.
Some Differences in the New ASHAWire
One obvious omission from the new ASHAWire is the topic collections. That’s a temporary situation, and in fact, the new platform was selected specifically so we could deliver better topic collections for you. Our previous approach was all automatic and limited to 40 collections on pages with minimal design.
When we roll out the new collections in 2019, you’ll see both an improved approach to building the collections and much greater flexibility and creativity in how we can feature the collections. We don’t have a date for this yet, but it will be a top focus at the turn of the year.
You also may notice that one key ingredient of ASHAWire is no longer present. The Clinical Research Education (CREd) Library is something that we have elected to house here on the ASHA Journals Academy. In fact, it makes its re-debut today as well, and we encourage you to take a look through this essential resource.
One other difference you’ll see in the new ASHAWire is, alas, a few bugs. Sites like these involve intensive development, so we ask for your patience as we work out some kinks related to appearance and very specific types of functionality. We have a healthy list of those refinements and fixes to make, but we will be churning through those rapidly in the first few months of 2019.
If you encounter something major or unusual changes in how things are working from one visit to the next, please don’t hesitate to let us know via the “Contact Us” links at the bottom of the pages. And if you like particular things or wish the new ASHAWire had additional features, feel free to drop us a line or reach out via our social media channels. We look forward to hearing how you like it!
