Our new website is live!

After months of hard work we are delighted to share a fresh, new website that reflects our commitment to creating the conditions for the sector to flourish. It is a place for us to share the excellent practice we see in the sector along with the great results our partners are getting through their innovation projects. Whether you are looking for the ASPire Hub, wanting to sign up to our events, exploring our resources or just browsing, our new site will make it easier to find what you want.

We’ve had a wee upgrade to our logo and colours as it had been a while, and Esme MacIntyre has created some beautiful illustrations for our landing pages. (To read more about how Esme works, read her guest blog here).

But it’s not just a fresh coat of paint. We realised that the previous organisation of our, frankly fabulous resources, no longer served the sector, so we have re-jigged this. Instead of things being organised by type, they are now organised by topic, from high level down, and for each of the high levels we have a highlighted resource that we think covers some excellent basics. You can search by topic or type and all our tags have been updated to help with this. We have also taken the opportunity to review our resources. We have ensured the most popular have been maintained but if something you like/used is missing let us know, we still have it, just archived.

You know we like to be transparent here at Iriss so you should know that not only was the site not serving the sector, but it wasn’t serving us. We had multiple sites on older platforms that we didn’t have the inhouse skills to maintain and we realised we needed to streamline. We moved our podcast to the website as a resource and have a dedicated support team for the site now. The excellent staff and guest blogs are there in their full glory along with the details on what it is we do to support the sector.

We have taken this time to review our images also. We know that stock photos are useful and believe they have their place but we wanted to use imagery that represented Iriss. We have started creating our own bank of images to use, all taken or created by our staff members (or bought for specific items) and these will be used on all new posts going forward. In addition, of course, to the lovely illustrations from Esme. We are committed to using our own images or images that we have paid the artist for as a part of our AI policy.

We adore our new site, but please do let us know if there is anything amiss or any resources you can’t find.