Aspen Words programs seek to provide readers and writers with opportunities to learn, read, and write with each other, cultivating a stronger writers’ community in Aspen, Colorado. We’re excited to help them reach as many writers and readers as possible and continue their work.
Throughout their development retainer, we have focused on providing the Aspen Words team the tools they need to better navigate and take care of their site, empowering them to make regular and frequent updates to reflect current and upcoming events within their organization. Most notably, the Cornershop team created multiple page templates to help expedite the process of creating new webpages and events, lowering the amount of time they have to spend creating pages from scratch and ensuring a standard user experience from page to page.
So far, we’ve made specific webpage layout and usability improvements on the Aspen Words Literary Prize, Aspen Writer’s Network events calendar, and Summer Words key program pages helped to make the content on these pages more readable and easier to navigate.
Over this past retainer term, we’ve focused on technical cleanup, plugin modernization, and infrastructure improvements behind the scenes. A big part of that work has meant phasing out legacy, unsupported plugins and replacing them with more maintainable, custom-built solutions, all while making day-to-day site management easier for the Aspen Words team.
We started by rebuilding the Aspen Writers Network (AWN) events page, replacing the unsupported Responsive Tabs plugin with a new, restyled solution that’s easier to maintain going forward. We took a similar approach on the Media page, introducing custom post types for videos, photos, recordings, and press mentions in place of the old Responsive Tabs layout, along with a scroll-friendly structure and dedicated archive pages. That rebuild is complete, though the page remains unpublished while the Aspen Words team updates its content internally; we expect it to go live within the next month or so.
On the About Us page, we replaced the WP Team Showcase & Slider plugin with a new team plugin, configuring three distinct staff groups, Staff, Advisory Council, and Creative Council, with custom styling to match. As with the Media page, this update is built and ready to go, launched summer 2026.
Aspen Words’ site runs on WPBakery, which left several areas difficult for the team to update and manage on their own. Since taking on this retainer, Cornershop’s main focus has been adapting the site’s highest-priority areas to be more user-friendly for Aspen Words to manage independently. Training calls and step-by-step guides have been a natural extension of that work, giving both staff and seasonal interns the resources they need to update content confidently without waiting on developer support.
Looking ahead, Cornershop has presented Aspen Words with a plan to restructure the retainer to support ongoing content strategy work alongside development. This shift will help Aspen Words get even more value from our partnership as the site’s technical foundation continues to improve.
See the other work we’ve done for the Aspen Institute and their programs here:
Aspen Words was founded to encourage writers, inspire readers, and connect people through the power of stories.
