A whole year in the planning and making, the new BISI website went live this afternoon.
If you're still using the old web address at the British Academy, the new site won't propagate there until the New Year. So delete that from your bookmarks (I won't link to it here) and add http://www.bisi.ac.uk/ right away!.
Large numbers of people contributed to making this happen, but I particularly want to thank Helen Taylor and Khalid Almaini of Cambridge Web Studios who patiently and painstakingly turned our initially rather incohate ideas into reality. BISI's fabulous administrators, Joan MacIver and (especially) Lauren Mulvee, put huge amounts of time and effort into it throughout the year. BISI volunteer Ewan Rodgers generously made a significant contribution in the final months too. Thank you all, and congratulations, Ewan, on your new job!
I hope you'll find the new site much nicer to look at than the old one (which I slung together as a supposedly temporary replacement for something even clunkier, way back in early 2008). It's got everything the old one had (though not always in the same place) plus a lot more content and functionality.
Most excitingly, you can now book places at BISI events online—reserve seats for free events, buy tickets for costed ones—as well as join the Institute, renew your membership, and make a donation. You can pay securely with PayPal, wherever you are the world.
We're also starting to use the website to distribute free PDFs of our books. Only a few are up so far, mostly more recent ones for which PDFs were made as part of the production process, but we're planning to digitise all our back-catalogue in due course.
You can also use it to access BISI's Facebook page and Twitter account, as well as this blog. (And now you know why I chose this particular design and colour-scheme when I started this blog back in the summer. We match!)
This has got my Christmas off to a fabulous start. Wherever you are, and however you celebrate the middle of winter/summer, I wish you a joyful and relaxing time of it too.
