By Dorian Martin, I Start Wondering Founder
I’m always thinking about what I want to share through I Start Wondering. Now as we sit with the ramifications of recent world events (including the 2024 U.S. presidential election), I personally need time to take in and digest what has happened at both the micro- and the macro-level.
I do plan to write more about this in the future, but what is clear is that we live in a dynamic world. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life (and sometimes the hard way), everything evolves and changes.
The same is true for I Start Wondering. The spark for this website began during a 2015 vacation with Kaye Olsson to Santa Fe, NM. Initially, Kaye’s suggestion was to create a website focused on the concept of lifelong learning, a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
With that said, once I started I Start Wondering, I realized that I did not have the bandwidth to create weekly posts—and also that I work better (and have more fun) when engaging with a team of innovative, like-minded individuals. Slowly but surely, that group assembled, offering a wide range of interests, experiences and perspectives for ISW’s community.
But nothing stays the same—and I Start Wondering’s evolution to serving women who had reached midlife and beyond emerged during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when we began seeing cracks in women’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual armor due to the combination of normal life changes, unrealistic expectations, and isolation.
Our team has adopted this new focus with great zest, looking at our own lives as well as those of our friends and communities to glean subject matter to share. We’re also comparing our lives with those of previous generations and taking stock of research, trends, and society’s notions of what it means to be an older woman.
Using this information, we’ve added more types of content, including features that introduce readers to inspiring older women and a podcast that will give more older women a platform to share their voice and wisdom. At the same time, we’re also looking at how we can develop I Start Wondering to become more of a community that is based on interaction, lifelong learning, and an invitation to play a part in creating a kinder and more collaborative world—but that’s a topic for another column.
We also realize that technology is rapidly evolving—and how we use it is changing as well. That’s given us the impetus to “refresh” our website’s functionality. Here’s what you’re currently seeing (or will be in the near future):
A New Look for Our Website
Thanks to our I Start Wondering web guru Myka Alley, we’ve refreshed and refined our website’s look. You’ll especially notice this if you tend to read our website on your phone. We believe this cleaner look will help you more easily find our latest offerings. You’ll also see a list of our most popular tags so you can find those columns, videos and podcasts, as well.
New Categories
We decided to reconfigure our categories to make them more concrete for users. The five categories we selected are:
Relationships – This category will focus on relationships of every sort—family, friendships, community, advocacy, and our role as global citizens.
Health – This category looks at women’s physical and mental health as well as the health of the planet.
Career and Retirement – This category delves into all aspects of career and also will highlight older women who are starting a new chapter through venturing into entrepreneurial endeavors. Additionally, we’ll use this category to address the sometimes-tricky transition into retirement.
Exploration – This category will serve as home for columns that address creativity, travel, finance, spirituality, advocacy, caregiving, and other topics that our columnists and community members are exploring.
Podcast – This category will serve as home to I Start Wondering Conversations, which are addressing a wide variety of issues that women are facing.
New Search Functions
We’ve updated and expanded the website’s search function. You can find the search function on the home page as well as on the Musings page. We’ve also reconfigured the search function so you can look by specific terms—such as retirement—in order to pull up the various content that our team has created.
Our website also will soon have the capacity for you to go to the “Our Team” page, open each columnist’s section, and then find everything they’ve written. (You already can use the drop-down menu function within the Musings section to find your favorite columnist’s work.)
Connecting with Our Team
We also are giving our team members the option to include information about how readers can reach out to hire them for services, whether that’s Rhonda Collins for career counseling, Mara Soloway for writing, Myka for web and graphic design, or another member of our group.
A Bookstore
As you’ve probably figured out, our group is a well-read bunch. To that end, we decided to create an affiliate link at Bookshop.org for the books that are recommended on ISW. We selected Bookshop.org because it gives you the chance to also support your local independent bookstore, which we think is really important at this time.
Our ISW affiliate bookstore on Bookshop offers a compilation of all the books recommended on the website. In addition, we’ve set up a separate page for each ISW columnist so if you find that you really want to know what one individual person has recommended, you can go to their shop.
We also added a Bookshop section to our website where you can easily link to our affiliate page.
Additionally, as a team, we decided that all proceeds will go into I Start Wondering’s coffers to support the work that we’re creating for you, our readers.
In Closing
We’re moving forward into new times—and our team is excited about the possibilities. We invite you to stay tuned and stay engaged.
Comments