It's hard to believe it's been over three months since dropping the first version of our website.

We broke the paywall, allowing all our articles to be read for free, focused on our commitment to making COSY a beautiful and eye-catching publication, and have since reached 8000 followers on Instagram - cultivating a great community of readers, writers and artists.

Launching the first version of the website was kinda hectic. We wanted to include so much, and suffered several delays due to new features like the COSY Dictionary being added last minute.

It's safe to say we all felt exhausted and burnt out immediately after dropping it, and it's something we wish to avoid moving forwards in developing the website.

So from now on, we plan on releasing incremental yet important changes to the website, which we'll be sure to tell you about as time progresses.

We've planned a definitive roadmap for developing the website for the rest of the year, with exciting new features rolled out on a regular basis.

For now, we're very proud of the changes made on the website so far, and waiting with bated breath to show you what else we have in store. But without further ado, here's what we've included in v1.1.

Search

  • One of the most notable features we've launched today is Search. You can search for articles, authors, and dictionary terms effortlessly in the navigation bar.
  • We've decided to made Search accessible on every page on both mobile and desktop browsing.

Aesthetics

  • You've probably noticed some major improvements on the aesthetic quality of the website. Our beautiful homepage now features an alphabet soup animation by our resident artist Martyna.
  • We are now using an updated version of Futura for a cleaner look across the board.
  • We've added some new transitions when flicking through different parts of the website, allowing a seamless experience of the website.
  • You can now change the background colour of articles from black to white and yellow. This suggestion comes from some of our readers who are living with dementia who have found the black background difficult to read.

Mobile Optimisation

  • We felt the mobile version of COSY.LAND was neglected from a design perspective, so we have endeavoured to improve on every possible element we could.
  • You can also add COSY to your iOS home page, and pretend it's a real app until we launch one later this year.

Tags

  • We've added 3 new tags since launching the website: news, language, and disability.
  • We've centred the tag system on the homepage to allow you to jump between subjects with ease.

(If you notice any problems, letting us know would be super helpful!)

We always want to be transparent with you in the things we are doing next (without spoiling the surprise).

In the next few weeks, we are working on syndicating our content onto all possible news platforms like Apple News, Google News, and Flipboard.

We're working on making COSY.LAND more visible on the internet via SEO, and integrating the website with alternative social media platforms like Pinterest and LinkedIn to help our authors gain even more attention on their work.

That's it for now, but we will be back very soon with v1.2. x

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