We are happy to unveil our new website, lovingly built by the talented team at Cosmic, with a goal of centering and celebrating the incredible community of artists that we serve, while making all of our resources and programming available in one easy place.

This last point may sound like a modest goal, but last year we were managing half a dozen websites. We’re happy to now have most of our programs under one virtual roof. What this means:

• Open Studios now lives here, within our main site. You can still find Open Studios through the url santacruzopenstudios.com. This new Open Studios site will feature a great map and artist directory that we’re excited to unveil later this year when we announce the artists participating in Open Studios 2023.

• Watsonville Center for the Arts is now housed here as well. Similarly, you can still use the url watsonvillecenterforthearts.org.

• We now have translation site-wide. Visit artscouncilsc.org/es to view the Spanish site, or click on the language icon in the header bar. Some of our more evergreen pages have been translated by a human (Beatriz Trujillo of Tru Translations - thanks Beatriz!). Much of the site has also been autotranslated by a computer. So, while the translation is imperfect, we will continue to work on tweaking things manually to make it better over time.

• Image credit - if you click on the “i” in the bottom right of the header images you can see image credit. We’re grateful to Cosmic’s design team for this simple fix for a notoriously tricky problem with website design.

• Everything meets today’s accessibility standards. Again this might be invisible to most of us but it needed to happen, and now it has.

• Our online donation portal should work a little more smoothly than our previous site. Give it a whirl if you like!

• Finally, Cosmic’s design team refreshed our overall look and feel, which we’re thrilled about.

Thanks to the generous folks who supplied us with testimonials, which we’ve sprinkled liberally throughout. To the artists whose work we’re sharing in imagery throughout the site. And to the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation for funding the project through our Adaptation Grant.

The site is still a work in progress, and we would love your help identifying any links that aren’t working or any other fixes needed. We’ve installed a user feedback tool that will be active for 30 days. If you’re browsing our site and find something that needs attention feel free to fill out a feedback slip using the green “feedback” box in the bottom right-hand corner. The more information you can give us (what browser are you using, what action were you taking, etc.) the better.

Thank you!