New Orleans (NOLA) - The ASCE New Orleans Branch has launched its new website for March 2008. The new webiste features a Content Management System that allows branch officers to update web content on-the-fly and will reduce website management costs. The new webstie also features a more robust calendar module, a current news handler and newsletter manager.

The biggest benifits are from the Content Management System and the web page committee can now add, update and remove pages, edit features in the menu and add new website services to the membership without the need to hire website administrators on an hourly basis. As an example of this, the new website now features a Current News section. This section will syndicate New Orleans Area or Southeast Louisiana area news related to civil engineering. Articles from local headlines, such as Nola.com, or national headlines, such as CNN, that impact Civil Engineering in our area willl be avaiable for viewing on our site. ASCE National News and Louisiana Section news will also be featured on our site as it is relevant to our membership. The Current News section will also feature editorials from Deborah Keller, a New Orleans Branch past president, who has been providing editorials for the Louisiana Journal for the past six months.

The new calendar module and newsletter manager will allow easier managemnet of posting and notifying members of upcoming ASCE events. A major weakness of the older system was that the mailing list had to be manually managed and was a very daunting task. The new tools allow for better data managing between our ASCE national membership roster and the ASCE New Orleans Branch mailing lists. Each year, the local mailing lists will be updated using the national roster. So, please, keep your national ASCE member profile current; you can do so by access the national asce page through the link in our menu on the left.

To better serve our member's interest, our new newsletter manager allows you to specify whether you want to be updated on all ASCE New Orleans Branch news, or specify topics in which topics you are only interested in:

• ASCE New Orleans Branch General Mailing List
• ASCE New Orleans Branch Younger Members Mailing List
• ASCE SEI - New Orleans Chapter Mailing List
• ASCE TDI - Louisiana Section Mailing List

In conjuntion with our annual awards luncheon in June, the web page committee will launch a new section of the website to honor past award recipients and provide achievement profiles on our current award recipients.

If anyone would like to recomend updates to the new site, inclduing news articles or new web featuers, or help in managing the website, please contact the Web Page Committee.

- Christopher L Sanchez, P.E.