Welcome to our New Website!

Welcome to mountaineers.org 2.0! This project has been years in the making and we truly believe the new website will increase our ability to get more people outside. We owe a heartfelt THANK YOU to our teams of volunteers and supporters who helped us test the website and launch on time.

The new site includes improvements to our activity search and course signups, enhancements to our routes and places, and the addition of trip reports, blogs, and more leader resources. We've also added badges to better explain our course prerequisites, showcase the knowledge you can learn with us, and denote our highly-skilled volunteers. With any change comes growing pains, but hope all of the other amazing features of the new site make up for it. Oh, and did we mention we're getting rid of the Initiation Fee?

Questions?

Learn more about our project plan and scope and where we'd like to go in the future. Understand any changes to your membership, why you need to change your password, and why we didn't save your credit card information from the old site. Eyes glazing over? Read an entertaining story about why we think the new website is like the best jacket you'll ever own.

This site is a work in progress and expect you may find some typos or links that are broken. If you find any errors, please let us know by reporting an error. Interested in a training session for the new website? We have those too. Please join any of our branch training sessions where we will show you the ins and outs of the new site and answer any of your questions. Having trouble accessing the site? It'll be a little slow the first few days as we work out the kinks (related to password resetting and the import of courses/activities scheduled on the new site to the old site) but expect it to be up to normal speedy by mid-May. Also note - due to browser constraints, we are optimized to work on Internet Explorer 9 and above, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari. If you have an older version of Explorer (8 or below), you will need to download the most recent version of Explorer. Sorry - Microsoft doesn't support anything older than IE9, so we felt it prudent not to either.

Project Plan, Scope and execution

If you're interested in the technical explanation of the site development process, read below. For a simple and entertaining overview, check out our "jacket story."

The Mountaineers has historically made technology decisions based on immediate needs, without a clear focus on governance, effectiveness, or efficiency of the entire technology environment. While this has allowed us to change how we run the organization for the better, it has also been a challenge for us to keep up with the pace of change.  

This project took a holistic view of how the The Mountaineers used technology in the past and examined the possibilities for how we'd like to use it in the future. Beginning two years ago we started gathering feedback from volunteers, members, and guests. The feedback provided served as the outline of our original design and requirements and we started building using an "agile development" approach. This allowed us to test the site as we were building. We completed internal testing and content development in late February, and launched external testing March and April. The final week in April and May was spent fixing the bugs uncovered during testing. We launched on May 5th - an ideal launch date because it is a transitional period for us: many courses that started in winter and spring are winding down and the spring and summer are just starting to wind up.

Our ultimate goal with the new website was to simplify and improve as many processes as possible. We designed and built simple tools for our leaders, making it easier for volunteers to volunteer. We improved the process for people to sign up for memberships, courses and activities, and to make donations. And we added new features and created a space where people can easily learn about who we are and what we do.

We are quite pleased with the results. The new website is friendly, contemporary, and modern. We’ve made our courses and activities more accessible, making it easy for our members and guests to learn about the many ways we can help them explore the outdoors. And we’ve created a blog section which will serve to highlight our skilled volunteers, showcase our diverse conservation efforts, and direct people to our vast portfolio of outdoor knowledge.

Best of all, we completed the project on time and on budget.

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The Future of mountaineers.org

As you can imagine, we’re excited about this project and what it means for our members and programs. Watching this evolve from early user interface discussions to a nearly completed system has been fantastic. But we’re not done. Arguably, we’ll never be done – we will work to constantly evolve this new website to better meet our current and future needs.

Through the course of this project, we identified many more items that won’t be included at launch in May. Some are because of complexity, some because of time, and for many, we want to get used to our new system before enhancing certain elements. We have dozens of items on our backlog.  Some are very important, some are not as important. We will review and prioritize these items and any identified by our volunteers and members. Visit our mountaineers.org 2.0 page for the complete list of future enhancements and a link for suggesting that's not yet on our list. Here are some items we know are a high priority are: 

• Improved Program Center Calendar scheduling and management. Development to start May 19 and be complete by the end of June.

• Integrating book purchase into the shopping cart so that members to purchase books along with a membership and course. 

• Importing activity and course history so that members can review what they’ve done and staff can create reports. Note that all prerequisites one might need for activity registration will be part of badge rosters that will be imported. 

• Improved accounting functionality and integration. 

• Map search in addition to the list-style faceted search for activities, courses and Route & Places. A cool feature that requires a small amount of development.  

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Why our website is like a new jacket

Picture this: It's 2003, and you're standing in your favorite outdoor store about to walk out with a brand new jacket. Man, this jacket is going to be THE BEST. It features the latest in Gore-Tex technology, has some sweet pockets and pit-zips, AND integrates with your hip new headphone cord and state-of-the-art iPod. You wear that thing everywhere. Your friends are jealous and you are sure you will never, ever need another jacket for the rest of your life.

Then, slowly but surely, the jacket begins to lose its luster. The color starts to fade. Your waterproofing isn't what it used to be. Apple releases a new, smaller iPod and suddenly your specially designed pouch seems laughably large. Your friends buy cooler jackets and you're jealous.

Unable to part with your dearly beloved, in 2011 you launch a full-scale "jacket refurbishment project" designed to restore your coat to it's former glory. And it works! The color seems brighter, the tech-coating keeps the water out, and the technology pocket is suddenly the perfect size for your new state-of-the-art cell phone. Win!

But soon enough you realize the jacket is just past its prime. You resign yourself to finding something different. Better. For two years you ask your friends about their jackets. You try on different brands and styles. You agonize over specs, optimizing your best weight-to-feature-to-price ratio.

Assured you've made the best possible choice, you buy the new coat. You are sure you will never, ever need another jacket for the rest of your life.

That's kind of what we've done, only replace "jacket" in this story with "website". We've had our old site since 2003, did a full-scale "website refurbishment project" in 2011, and set out to create something better by agonizing over specs and requirements for two years. Now we are ready to unveil the newly designed, vibrant, and innovative mountaineers.org 2.0 designed with YOU in mind.

Our ultimate goal was to simplify and improve as many processes as possible. We built simple tools for our leaders - making it easier for volunteers to volunteer. We improved the process for people to sign up for memberships, courses and activities, and to make donations. And we added new features and created a space where people can easily learn about who we are and what we do.

We are quite pleased with the results. The new website is friendly, contemporary, and modern. We’ve made our courses and activities more accessible, making it easy for our members and guests to learn about the many ways we can help them explore the outdoors. And we’ve created a blog section which will serve to highlight our skilled volunteers, showcase our diverse conservation efforts, and direct people to our vast portfolio of outdoor knowledge.

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Membership Changes

On the old site we had nearly 20 membership "types".  The new site will have only seven membership types: Adult, Family, Student, Senior, Peak Society, Guest Adult, and Guest Family. The price of each membership is not increasing, and in fact we have eliminated our $35 initiation fee!

Every membership is important to us, and we have contacted members whose membership category has been affected. In some cases, your membership type will change (effected categories include Out of State, Low Income, Spouse, Contributing, and Supporting member accounts) but you will continue to have the same access before and do not need to do anything differently. If you notice your membership category has changed in the new system and have questions, please contact our Member Services Team at info@mountaineers.org.

Another temporary change to your membership includes the lack of activity and trip history on your profile page. We do plan to import this data from our old site in the next few months, but it wasn't "mission critical" for launch so we opted to launch sooner without the historical data vs. later with the historical data. You will still have all of the same permissions and prerequisites as before, and these are awarded through our new badges system. 

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Changes to your password

Due to internet security and encryption safety concerns, everyone will need to reset their password on the new website. To do so, visit our login page and select the "reset your password" button. Enter your First and Last name, and email address, and we will send you a message with a link to complete your password reset.

Note: the password reset request is case sensitive for your first and last name, and you will need to capitalize the first letter of each. You can reset your password to the same password you used on the old website.

We apologize for this inconvenience.  

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Update your credit card information

Due to internet security and encryption safety concerns, members who previously had credit cards saved with us for AutoRenewal will need to re-enter the credit card information.

To do so, visit your My Profile and select ‘recurring payments’ to get started. If you have any questions about this process, please contact our Member Services Team. We are here to help! 

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Report an error or typo

We've done lots of testing on our new website, but do anticipate uncovering errors and typos as we continue to build and improve. If you find an error, please follow these three steps:

1. Take a screen capture of the error message. If you cannot capture it, please copy and paste the text you are seeing on the error screen.
2. Copy the URL for the webpage you were trying to access
3. Write up a brief description of what you were trying to do so that we can attempt to replicate the issue or where you saw the typo so that we may fix it.

Send your email with the screen capture, URL, and brief description to our Member Services Team at info@mountaineers.org. We will address issues in the order of priority and in the order received. 

Thanks for helping us make our new site even better!

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Join a training session

We are currently working to schedule trainings for the new website. We will host a training at each of our branch locations and will make those dates public for anyone to attend. These training sessions will cover the basics of the new website and answer questions from members in attendance.

View our branch pages and check out their calendars to find a training session that is most convenient for you. We welcome your feedback and questions.

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