A few weeks ago, to a bit of fanfare, Greenpeace USA unveiled their new Web site. After seeing the news story announcing this, which was titled “As Greenpeace unveils new website, environmental villains quake in their dirty boots,” with great anticipation, I rolled my browser over to the new site. A few minutes after I got there and toured the site, I yawned and thought “so what?”

My next thought was about the title of their introductory article “As Greenpeace unveils new website, environmental villains quake in their dirty boots.” Greenpeace takes this communications tack quite often. They frequently portray themselves as the scariest thing to be on Earth since tyrannosaurus rex went around having its neighbors for lunch. When Greenpeace does this, I think that if they were actually that scary why do they have to keep telling everyone? But I moved past that tired thought and on to thinking about the rest of their new site.

The new Greenpeace USA site is more “socially” oriented than the old site; it features on the home page a blog style format with tabs for News, Images, Videos, Reports, and Media Releases. The formatting is better than their previous site version, making it easier to find things. In fact in the introductory article, Greenpeace says that their new designs, which involved “months and months of coding” “make it easier for YOU to find what you’re looking for.” I’ll agree. The site is cleaner, and not as cluttered as their old site. Looks like they “vacuumed out” some unneeded material. But why it took months and months of coding, I don’t know. The new site is nothing revolutionary, so the months spent, or claimed to have been spent, seem foolish. In configuration, it highly resembles the format of Facebook or about 500 other sites I’ve seen. There are many Web site templates available for a few hundred bucks that one can drop into their server and get the same effect.

However, on the positive side, I will say that the new Web site does hold a lot of advantages for me. Because Greenpeace USA now has better organized its “information,” such as their “exposé reports,” which are filled with questionable research methodology, such as I have analyzed previously on this blog, the new Greenpeace site makes it easier for me to find their poorly researched material about which to review, critique, and write. So, for that I will say . . .

Thanks, Greenpeace.