Welcome to the new GSA Web Pages

5 Oct 2015
Joe Barrett

It has taken some effort – as Alan said it would – but we are almost there with the new GSA web site. The old site will run along side the new site for some weeks while we bring it fully online in all areas – there is nothing wrong in being cautious! So you can make your choice; hold out and stick with the old site or jump in head first to the new site.

So why the change?

The old GSA site had become somewhat redundant. It was hard coded in HTML4, was not editable by anyone other than the webmaster and was not mobile friendly; a key requirement from Google if you want to be high on their search list in future. There were also many parts of the site that were not being updated and were therefore redundant. And the design, though functional, was somewhat tired.

Even so – GSA registrations have continued to grow towards 70k registered online users and downloads from the site average 240k per year. In our book, that is pretty cool.

The new site is designed to make it easier to find the reports you are looking for and to enable you to download them quickly. You will find the filter feature at the top of the page useful for sifting out the papers you download the most – like the Evolution to LTE report that Alan faithfully updates every quarter. We have also colour coded the document frames, so if you are looking for LTE, it is Orange, 5G is Red. Just hover your cursor over the Communities link at the top of the page and you will see the full range of topics and their colour codes. And as always the latest papers are always first to load.

You will also see that we have different size document frames – you will find Executive member reports in full frames, while Member reports and presentation material will be found in half frames. Both of these frames have background images to better promote our members. All other papers will be in quarter frames without an image. GSA reports – and there are many of them – will be found in all three size frames, depending on the content, and the mood of the president when posting. It may sound complex but we hope you get used to it.

We know there may be some changes in the coming weeks and we do hope that you will provide feedback both positive and negative so we can continually improve the site and your web site experience. Once the site is fully established we will look to implement some new ideas that will make the GSA web site even more valuable to our members and our on line audience. More of that in the coming months.

Finally a note on why we are asking you to register again. Migrating the old database in an outdated and customized format to the new site was just not cost effective. It would have been a manual and laborious process. So we hope you take a few minutes and register – it really is quite simple.

For now we hope you will continue to come back to the GSA and download the reports, statistics and charts that GSA has become renown for.

Best regards,

Joe Barrett

President. GSA