Whether you’re a regular or only an occasional visitor to our website, we hope you find it informative and interesting. If that applies to you, you’re not alone: nearly six million people visited our website last year and, in a recent survey, 88% of people who had used the site, told us that they found it helpful.

So, it’s a good website but, since last year, we’ve been working on a new website, which we will launch in late August. It will still have the same useful content and features – like the online community – but we’ll be making it even better.

We’ll be adding more information to this page as we approach the launch date, so you will know what to expect and how to find your way around the new website when it arrives. For now, here’s an introduction to some of its new features.

New features

• Information and advice about autism – this is the most important content on our old – and on our new website. On our new website, it will be much easier to find the topics you are looking for, and then to move easily to related information. And we’ve introduced more information on the topics you’ve told us are important, such as mental health, and we will continue to review and improve our autism information.
• Autism information that’s tailored for you – we’re gradually introducing guides tailored to your needs as an autistic person, and/or a parent, and/or a professional working to support autistic people and their families. You’ll of course be able to look at all content, but you’ll also be able to search for autism information and other content that’s tailored for you.
• Content for autism professionals: changes to Network Autism – between now and the end of the year, we’re going to be gradually integrating articles from Network Autism, our website for autism professionals, into our new website. This means even more people will have access to this great content, written for and often by autism professionals. There’s more information about the changes on the Network Autism site here.
• Improved accessibility – the new website will reflect original research we carried out with autistic people about what you want in a website. We’ll post more information about that here in the next few weeks.
• New design – the website will look different. All the changes are designed to make the site clearer and easier to use. There’s an image of how the home page will look above and we’ll be sharing more details here about how the different sections of the site will look.

Why we’re creating a new website

We know that the current website is popular and well-used. Although there is always a case for improving a website, we wouldn’t have decided to invest our charity’s money and time without good reason.

Here are the key reasons why we’re creating a new website:

1. We want it to do an even better job providing you with the information and advice you need, particularly during key life challenges like getting a diagnosis, finding a school or job, or dealing with mental health issues.
2. We want it to fully reflect how our charity now talks about autistic people and autism. We made some of these changes when we rebranded in 2018 (there’s more information about that here) but a new website means we can make all the changes we need to.
3. We want to make it easier for you to find out about our services and other autism services through an improved Autism Services Directory – and how you can get involved with our campaigns, fundraising and volunteering.
4. We had to. Our current website is built in an old content management system (CMS) with lots of customised changes, so we can’t simply update it. This becomes completely obsolescent at the end of the year, with no support. So we’ve invested in a new website, built on a new CMS which we can develop and support in-house. This will have the added benefit of saving our charity money which we’ll be able to spend on delivering more and better information and support.

We hope you find this information helpful. We’ll continue to add more details, as we approach the new website’s launch, starting here with an update about accessibility and how to find your way around the site.