We have some important updates to share regarding the structure of our websites and the progress we’ve made on our massive summer revamp project.
Consolidating Our Websites
Our one-year experiment with our secondary website, Youth Activity Archive, is officially complete. We will be moving all content from Youth Activity Archive back to The Badge Archive.
Initially, we created a second domain to house the growing pile of activity instructions, hoping it would make everything easier to organize and use. Since then, we have learned a great deal more about how category and tag systems work, and we’ve realized that maintaining two separate sites is simply no longer necessary.
The Badge Archive has grown immensely. We currently host thousands of pages and posts covering badges, organizational information, and meeting plans. We have over 1,000 PDF files (outlines, worksheets, and printables), and nearly 2,000 images. When we started tracking how many activities we were archiving, the sheer volume became apparent. For example, our Girl Scout Cookie badge activities alone account for 250 pages, and we have over 100 posts dedicated just to songs.
We quickly found that the category system we envisioned for the Youth Activity Archive site wasn’t going to work smoothly. Many activities overlap across different categories or exist solely to fulfill a specific badge requirement. Because managing this volume of content is overwhelming whether it is separated or combined, we have decided it makes the most sense to pay for, manage, and focus our efforts on a single website.
Update on the Badge Pages Revamp
At the start of the summer, we began a complete revamp of our badge pages, dedicating 20 to 30 hours a week to the project.
Navigating copyright laws, terms of use regulations, and artistic use legalities has been a monumental effort. To ensure our site remains compliant and sustainable for years to come, we have had to strictly evaluate the content we keep, recreate images representing the badges several times over, and rework the overall theme and look of the website.
Our initial goal was to update all elementary levels of GSUSA and Cub Scouts by the end of the summer. We have currently completed all Junior Level GSUSA Current badges… and that is it. We did not get to the journeys, awards, or retired badges for the Junior level, nor did we reach the other GSUSA levels or the Cub Scout pages.
While we are disappointed we didn’t get further along, we are acknowledging that this task was significantly larger than we originally anticipated.
What to Expect Next
We are going to take a short pause on the badge page revamp to focus on two things:
- Migrating the Youth Activity Archive content over to The Badge Archive.
- Wrapping up and posting a few projects we’ve been working on with our own troop for everyone to use.
Once those tasks are complete, the updated badge pages will continue. This progress will be much slower than we initially projected. We are taking things one step at a time, so we will not be providing a timeline or estimated completion dates moving forward.
Thank You
We want to express our deepest gratitude to our supporters. Thank you to those who consistently provide feedback, those who cheer us on, and those who patiently navigate our constant website construction. We appreciate everyone who is willing to wait alongside us as we work to deliver the long-term improvements we’ve promised.
We are incredibly happy to have you all along with us on this journey.
– The Badge Archive Team
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