scottishgeology.com – end of an era

The scottishgeology.com website has been the mainstay of public engagement in Scotland’s geology for over 20 years. It was originally established to host the 3rd Scottish Geology Week in 2001 (you can read about the developments from that period in the excellent archive of the Earth Heritage magazine).

The site rapidly developed as a gateway to all things geological in Scotland, with information about famous geologists, an introduction to the geology of different regions and links to organisations and publications.

An enthusiastic team, often on a volunteer basis, continued to maintain the website through the 2000s, as the Scottish Geology Week, later the Scottish Geology Festival, waned due to lack of funding and support. Key contributors, such as Diane Mitchell at National Museums of Scotland, moved on.

By 2010, the Festival working group were in discussion with other partners, leading to the launch in 2011 of the Scottish Geodiversity Forum, which took on the management of scottishgeology.com. A complete revamp of the site went live in March 2012, moving to a responsive design with WordPress to simplify ongoing management and updating.

Projects organised by the Forum and partners added new content, including an entirely new section on Scotland’s fossils contributed by science writer and poet Lara Reid on a voluntary basis in 2014. The website hosted the Hugh Miller Writing Competitions in 2016, 2018 and 2020. In 2017, the Forum’s 51 Best Places to see Scotland’s Geology project added substantial new content that captured the imagination of people around the world and greatly increased traffic to the site (so much so that our bit of the internet broke on launch day). Throughout this period Angus Miller, the Chair of the Forum, was often the sole webmaster, battling to keep the site live and reasonably up-to-date through various hiccups.

With the launch of the Scottish Geology Trust in 2020, management of the site passed to the Trust, and the Comms team were keen to utilise the existing quality content from scottishgeology.com. After some consideration, it was decided to integrate this content into the new, professionally designed, SGT website in a new ‘geology’ section. This launched in May 2023, supported by a huge amount of behind-the-scenes updating and improving by web designer Gordon Lang.

So, farewell, after 22 years, of a mainstay of communication about and promotion of Scotland’s geology. But don’t grieve, because the domain name stays with the Scottish Geology Trust, and technical wizardry by Gordon means that all pages of the old site are mapped to the new content in www.scottishgeologytrust.org/geology/.

Scottishgeology.com – the home of geology lives on!