Refresh: A New Look for NiCHE

We’ve changed the look of the NiCHE website and there are more changes to come. Since migrating the NiCHE website to WordPress a few years ago, we have strived to make the site a better platform for writing and disseminating news and information about environmental history research in Canada. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles on our blog, The Otter~La loutre, dozens of podcast episodes of Nature’s Past, a regular video series called #EnvHist Worth Reading, and continuous news and announcements of events and deadlines. Now, we want to do more.

This fresh coat of paint (in the form of a new theme and style for the site) pushes the NiCHE website even further toward our goal of establishing a web-publishing platform for environmental history research in Canada. This beautiful new theme comes to us from the talented developers at Codestag. It makes it easier to publish articles, audio, and video. You will notice that the theme prioritizes writing with a focused view by hiding the sidebar in a hamburger menu and removing other distracting menus and widgets. It also allows us to better present visuals, like big, big photos:

If you’re viewing this website on a smartphone or tablet, it still looks great. We want to make all the writing and other content on the NiCHE website attractive and easy to access.

While this new theme continues to support all of the existing content on the NiCHE website, it will soon be able to support new types of content. We want to be able to publish long-form research papers. We want to support research project pages as hubs for ongoing work in the field. We want to offer more teaching materials.

As we roll out this new theme, you may notice some of the sub-pages of the site in need of editing and adjustments. Pardon our mess. We’re working on cleaning all that up.

Meanwhile, the NiCHE website continues to be the best platform for disseminating environmental history research in Canada and we plan to make it even better. We hope you will consider contributing now by writing for The Otter~La loutre. Try out our new theme. We think you’ll like it.