{"id":5985,"date":"2015-08-31T22:01:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T03:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=5985"},"modified":"2025-04-04T00:24:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T05:24:08","slug":"the-evolution-of-uw-madisons-writing-center-online-a-wayback-look","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/the-evolution-of-uw-madisons-writing-center-online-a-wayback-look\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of UW-Madison’s Writing Center Online: A Wayback Look"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Brad Hughes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brad Hughes is the director of the Writing Center and director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is delighted to be starting his 32nd year as director of the Writing Center.<\/em><\/p>\n

As we start a new academic year, this seems like a good time to celebrate an important anniversary for our Writing Center. This year the online portion of our Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (writing.wisc.edu\/<\/a>) is celebrating its 20th anniversary–or its 21st, or 22nd, depending on how you count; I will explain in a minute. (Our Writing Center as a whole is heading toward its 50th anniversary in a few years.) Since our base-ten number system makes 20 seem like a significant number and since this story hasn’t been told, I thought it would be fun to trace the history of our center\u2019s online presence. And I thought it would be fun to reveal some out-of-date web fashions–that’s our original website in the featured photo above:-).<\/p>\n

Over the decades, our Online Writing Center has become an integral component of our Writing Center programs at UW-Madison. In fact, I\u2019m a big believer in convergence\u2014that is, I believe that those of us in the writing center profession should stop thinking of online and in-person programs as distinct, but instead as productively, even magically, intertwined. One more key reason drives my passion for what we do online: increasing student access to all that a writing center does. Just as our evening and weekend hours in residence halls, multicultural-student centers, campus libraries, and public libraries across our city make our center more accessible and more inclusive, so do all of our online offerings.<\/p>\n

What We Offer Online<\/h2>\n

Over the years the content of our online site has grown steadily, thanks to the hard work and the vision of countless members of our staff. And the reach of those materials\u2014the number of links to our materials and the number of readers around the world–has grown in ways that amaze us. In October 2014, for example, our Online Writing Center had over 6 million hits from over 548,000 unique visitors from around the world–just in that one month.<\/p>\n

As is the case for most writing centers, our online site is now the front door for our center\u2019s programs\u2014providing information for students and faculty and writing center colleagues at other universities about our programs and locations and staff. As we have updated our descriptions of our programs and pedagogy, we have tried to follow Mickey Harris\u2019s great advice, in a 2010 Writing Center Journal<\/em> article, about creating sticky institutional discourse for our websites.<\/p>\n

But online we offer much more than just information about our programs:<\/p>\n