Introducing the Cornell Lab’s new website

For the last few months, we’ve been overhauling the Cornell Lab’s website, giving it much the same kind of redesign as All About Birds got last year. We wanted our website to do a better job of conveying the breadth of what we do here, so that a Web visitor could get the same sense of connection that people do when they take a guided tour from one of our staff.

Introducing the Cornell Lab’s new websiteWe also wanted to remake the site to give you what you’re looking for—something we learned last year when many of you took a survey on this blog. You said you wanted to know more about what we do, but you also wanted to further your own goals of learning about birds, participating in citizen science, and connecting with us and with other birders. We put these items front and center on our new home page—and then we expanded the rest of the site to tell you more about us.

Here’s a rundown of some of the site’s main new features:

A new home page offers the highlights—stories about recent work; suggestions for how to explore our online museum archives, including sounds, video, and our online species guide; collected social network feeds, and a link to our annual report, so you can see how we put our funds to use.

Slideshows to introduce each aspect of our mission—Research, Education, Citizen Science, Technology, and Conservation—and lead into a page that tells you why we take such inspiration from each one.

A page for each of our 10 programs to tell you about each facet of our research and link to related project websites.

A new Staff Directory, so you can find us if you need us.

An expanded Visitor Center section to help you plan a visit: a map to get you here; trail guides and recent bird sightings for Sapsucker Woods; a run-down on the exhibits in our Visitor Center; and an events calendar so you know what will be happening when you come.

A browseable list of our publications, both scientific and general audience.

An expanded section about giving that we hope helps people understand what a tremendous impact even a small donation or membership in the Cornell Lab can have for research and conservation of the natural world.

Just like All About Birds, this site features many remarkable photos combed from the Birdshare photostream. We’ll be putting up thank-you badges for those in the coming days, just like we did with All About Birds. For now we’d like to tip our hat and say thank you to all the great photographers that participate in Birdshare. Your generosity makes a huge difference in our ability to help people learn about and become inspired by birds.

So get over to birds.cornell.edu, take a look around, and let us know what you think!