Introducing Our New Bird Cams Site and All About Birds “Refresh”

You may notice a new look to All About Birds and Bird Cams as you browse the sites today. It’s not your imagination: we’ve totally redesigned our Bird Cams website, and we’ve made a few adjustments to All About Birds. We hope you find these changes make our sites easier and more fun to use. Here’s what you need to know about what’s changed:

All About Birds: Easier Navigation

The main change to All About Birds is the introduction of a persistent global navigation—those drop-down menus you now see at the top of the page. These dropdowns used to be hidden in a topics menu (or “hamburger menu”) at the top left of the screen. The new arrangement should make these menus easier and quicker to use.

We’ve also redesigned the All About Birds home page to bring popular topics right out onto the front page. Now you can scroll down to see top articles sorted by topics such as Bird ID, Feeding Birds, FAQs, Living Bird magazine articles, etc. The landing page of our species guide now also features ID topics and courses to make browsing easier.

A final addition is the “Instant ID” button available in the top right of every screen, and right below each of the search boxes. This button opens up a Web version of our popular Merlin Bird ID app to help you find out a bird’s name and then learn more about it.

A Whole New Site for Bird Cams

Our popular Bird Cams project gets its first site upgrade since the project launched in 2012. Here are the main features of the redesign:

• bigger video players scale automatically to make the most of your phone, tablet, or computer screen
• the video player automatically minimizes and keeps playing if you scroll down the page to read highlights or news, so you don’t miss anything
• a Twitter button lets you view or hide commentary from each cam’s Twitter feed
• highlight videos clips are accessible right below the live feed, with links to more on our YouTube and Instagram channels
• a dedicated news feed for each cam, complete with comments section, lets you can share and discuss what’s happening
• a new Timeline page for each cam lets you scroll back through time to view highlights and compare key events from previous cam seasons

For more details about the new features, plus a short FAQ section, check out the Bird Cams news article about the redesign.