Welcome to Peak Prosperity!
After more than a year of planning and hard work, we’re thrilled to share this new site with you.
What We Focused On
Our principal goals for Peak Prosperity are to offer a better user experience than ChrisMartenson.com (our recently-retired previous site — may it rest in peace, *sniff*) and to introduce solutions for the needs most frequently voiced by our readers over the years.
We gave priority to the following benefits when building this site:
- make it more intuitive to navigate and find what you’re looking for
- improve our ability to deliver more content, more frequently, to our readers
- clarify our brand, our positive vision, and what we stand for
- better empower resiliency-building at the personal and community level
- improve site performance, stability, and reliability
What to Look For
As you start to use the new site, keep your eye out for the following enhancements:
- New brand – We chose Peak Prosperity and its supporting tagline and logo in order to be much more clear that, despite the warnings within the Crash Course, our mission is one of purposeful optimism and gain for those willing to take control of their future. Our core message is: “Even in the era of Peak Everything, you CAN prosper.” It just involves assuming responsibility for your destiny, as well as expanding your definition of what “prosperity” means beyond simply the number of dollars in your bank account.
- New look & feel – The design of the site seeks to combine the best practices of website usability with a clean, appealing look. The layout is much more intuitive, cleaner, and less cluttered. And the friendly, calming color scheme complements well the positive message at the heart of our brand.
- More visible content – If you look at the front page of Peak Prosperity, you’ll see nine headlines before having to scroll down the page. That’s eight more headlines than were visible when landing on ChrisMartenson.com! We also make it much easier to discern which content is available to everyone and which is only available to our enrolled users. (Enrolled content has a differentiated golden color scheme, as well as “$” icons and sashes associated with it).
- Easier-to-read content – We’ve added design changes as well as introduced new tools that make the article content easier to read. For instance, you can now easily increase or decrease the font size of any article you’re reading. It’s also simple to print out a “printer-friendly” version of the article for reading when away from your computer.
- Enhanced Comments – The most notable change here is the new ability to vote on comments that you like. We then surface the highest-rated ones as Popular Comments, so you can easily find the day’s best gems of wisdom. We’ve also dramatically increased the number of comments per page, so you’re not having to continuously click to new pages to follow the conversation on a post or forum.
- Dedicated Section to Resiliency Building – Our new Resilient Life section is accessed by clicking the “Prepare” tab in the site header. This brings you to a home screen for all our resiliency content and resources. Some of those resources, like the What Should I Do? series, are familiar to you. But a number of important ones are new:
- Groups – Groups allow you to (finally!) easily locate other like-minded individuals in your area to collaborate with. And they also let you connect with others around a specific topic, passion, or skill. Watch the brief tour of Groups in Video #3 below.
- Wikis – Our new Wikis are primers that contain the collective knowledge of the Peak Prosperity community on many of the most important topics related to building personal resiliency. Video #3 below also gives you a brief tour of the Wikis.
- Daily Prep – Similar to the Daily Digest, the Daily Prep is a compendium of resiliency-related headlines that catch our attention each day.
- Locating users by expertise – Looking for a seasoned gardener to bounce a question off? Would you love to check with a car-maintenance junkie before sending your car into the shop? You user account now lets you identify skills you’re willing to let the community know about. We’ll soon allow you to search users by expertise, so that you can find expert minds to tap when the need arises.
- Better site search – Many of you will be relieved to hear that we’ve updated the horsepower behind our site search. Now you’ll actually get instant, focused results about what you’re looking for.
- Better spam protection – We’ve put in new security measures that should foil most spam posters attacking the site. The trade-off here is that you will occasionally find yourself prompted to prove you’re a human when submitting a comment to the site. It shouldn’t be an inconvenience outweighing the benefit of freedom from spam, but let us know if you find you disagree.
- More social media options – We’ve added Google+ to our portfolio of ways to follow us via social media. You’ll now find Google+ and LinkedIn ‘share’ buttons at the top of every article, along with Facebook and Twitter. Our popular YouTube channel is getting a makeover as well.
- Warmly welcoming new users to the site – For those interested in referring people to this site, we’ve created a nice onboard experience for those new to Peak Prosperity. If you’re logged out, just look for the tab in the upper right corner of the site that says “New user? Start here.” If you’re already logged in, you can access it by clicking here.
How to Use the New Site
If you haven’t watched them already, spend a few minutes watching these overviews of the new site.
Peak Prosperity
Resilient Life
Groups & Wikis
What You Should Do Right Now
If you have a few moments, here’s what you should do right now (provided you’re interested, of course):
- Visit Groups and search for a local group in your area. If one exists, join it. If not, create one yourself for others in your area to join
- Update your Peak Prosperity user account with any skills you care to share
- go to your user account and click on the “Personal Information” tab
Thanking Those Behind the Curtain
Finally, we’d like to thank those who made this site possible.
With deep appreciation, we’d like to acknowledge the professional talent involved in designing and building this site — namely the Shimshock Group, Ann Stringer Design, and Ward Hooper. In particular, we’re grateful for the expertise, perseverance, and patience (!) of Ron Shimshock which were critical in making our vision reality.
They are all looking forward to some well-deserved sleep now that this site is live. A few more minutes and I’ll join them…
We hope you find this new site to be as useful as we intend it to be. We’re sure there are likely to be some kinks to work out, so please be liberal with your feedback. We’ve set up a quick poll you can take (< 5 seconds), and also placed a blue ‘Feedback’ link at the left of every page — so if you have a thought to share or see something not working the way it should, please use it to give us a heads up.
Chris and I and the rest of the Peak Prosperity team are very excited about where — in partnership with you, our members — we’ll be able to go with this new site. It’s certainly going to be a big asset to our mission of helping to create a future worth inheriting.
Onward!
Adam
by singlespeak