it’s a momentous day for us at youth specialties. we’ve needed a new website for years. it got backburnered when we were acquired, and finally kicked back into high gear a half year ago, when we hired our new online marketing genius, cathy nerenberg, and told her, “get us a new website, fast!”

so here it is, the new youth specialties website.

the new site addresses lots of issues, but a few of the biggies are:

1. the old site had a massively sucky search function. our site has more free content – by a mile – than any other youth ministry site out there. but it was very difficult to find. that’s been completely addressed with this new release.

2. and, the store on our old site sucked. in fact, it was a bit of a frankenstein, cobbled together over the years. we had the hard goods store for regular books, then the didn’t-quite-work-like-we’d-hoped digital store, which we called ys underground. that’s all combined into one store now, and the whole thing works more smoothy (like, 3 clicks to purchase, rather than 7, or something like that!), and makes more intuitive sense. the store has way more categories, making it easier to find stuff. and it has customer reviews and ratings.

3. with the massive amount of content on the site, we thought it would be helpful to create some suggested groupings of stuff. so there are listings of suggested stuff (products, articles, etc) for Rookies, Veterans, Volunteers, Academics, Parents, and Students

there are lots of other improvements, and a few more rounds of good stuff to come (really great stuff, i’m so pumped!). but i’m thrilled to have this site live now. it allows us to serve youth workers better.

IN ADDITION, we had a few other sites go live in the last couple weeks:

the national youth workers convention site for this year

the canadian youth workers conference site for this year

and, the gorgeous convencion internacional lideres juvenil (spanish youth workers convention) site for this year

check ’em all out!