We are excited to provide our loyal lifters and followers with a new and enhanced website. This new website platform has a lot of updated features that simply were not possible on the old website.
Here is a quick list of new items:
- Better real-time integration with our Facebook page (facebook.com/mdpower) so people not on Facebook can follow discussions and posts and information being shared there.
- Integration with our Twitter account (@MDPower). All our Twitter activity can be seen here, just in case you are not not Twitter. Although we don’t have much Twitter activity now, we expect that to change this year – and we will be ready.
- Integration with our Instagram account (@marylandpowerlifting) so when we post pictures and short videos on Instagram, you see them here too. We recently rolled this out at our 2014 MD States Championship meet and took a few pictures and video. Similar to our Twitter account, we expect a lot more activity on Instagram this year.
- Mobile ready. This website uses a responsive design that changes based on the screen size of your device. There is no separate mobile site needed – just use this same website and the layout changes if your are on your phone, tablet, or laptop.
- This is a WordPress website. You can “Follow” this website by clicking on the Follow button. This will let you choose to receive alerts when new information is posted on this website.
- WordPress allows for multiple “webmasters”. WordPress provides easy to use tools to create new posts, update pages, post meet results, and update state records. Instead of one single webmaster, tasks such as updating state records and posting meet results can now be shared with multiple approved users.
- Better Search. The search box on the home page now searches all pages and posts. The search on the old website only allowed one single keyword and didn’t search all content.
- Comment on posts. WordPress allows you to add your own comments to posts. This creates the opportunity to have a running dialog directly on this website about a specific topic.
Why a new website was needed – There were numerous reasons to move to a new website platform. The old website was starting to have technical issues and was starting to go down more often – leaving visitors with only a “Service Unavailable” page. The old website was nearly 10 years old and built on technology that is no longer supported so in many ways, we were forced to find an alternative. This created a wonderful opportunity to set up Maryland Powerlifting for our future needs.
New weight classes for meets and state records – All the old records have been moved to this new website as an archive along with new State Records at the new weight classes. The records were converted according to USA Powerlifting guidelines.
Migrating content to the new website – Content from the old website has been migrated to this new website including all the Matt Gary articles, old and new state records, all available meet results, powerlifting rules, and other necessary pages. We were unable to migrate some of the customized database features from the old website such as the top 5 lifters from the last 5 meets.
Suggestions welcome – We certainly welcome any suggestions for improvement. Simply add your comments directly to this post.
We are USA Powerlifting Maryland. Our goal is to develop and promote drug-free powerlifting in Maryland.
USA Powerlifting MARYLAND 
Suggestions both positive and critical (but helpful) are welcome.
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