Site Redesign

As we discard old calendars and look ahead to a new year, we are also looking ahead to a new Army Counseling Online. ACO has been a trusted Army leader resource for over five years. In that time, the site has steadily served information to tens of thousands of visitors per month. Soldiers typically come to this site for three reasons:

  1. To access our collection of free Army leader resources
  2. To ask Army counseling questions on our message board
  3. To learn more about the Army Counseling Online software

We have changed the site design. But what else has changed? I’ll briefly review how the new Army Counseling Online relates to these three time-tested goals and how our partnership with newly-launched (ACO sister site) AskTop.net will improve your user experience.

Free resources for U.S. Army leaders

The biggest change out of the box is that we have added more resources. That’s right–we now have even more documents, forms, and presentations to offer you free of charge. Visit the new free resources page to see for yourself.

We are changing the way we organize our free resources.

ACO free resources now exclusively relate to Army counseling issues. We are teaming up with AskTop.net to host our other resources. AskTop aims to be a complete repository of free Army leadership resources on the web. That means that AskTop is the place to go for documents relating to Training, Awards, Evaluations, etc.

The counseling resources that remain on ACO are better organized for your convenience. You can now read descriptions of the files before you download them to help you determine if you are getting what you need. We have implemented a 5-star rating system. Users can now vote on the usefulness of a document and leave comments about specific downloads. This will help us weed out the less useful information and bring you more of the things our visitors like.

Army leader questions and answers

A staple of ACO has always been the leadership Q&A on our message boards. Soldiers have been asking questions about leadership and receiving personal responses from our Subject Matter Experts for years. We have received such positive feedback about this system that we’ve decided to expand it. This idea of the leadership Q&A was the inspiration for AskTop.net.

We’ve moved this public, forum-based Q&A feature to a more discreet system. Simply visit AskTop.net and fill out the question form to have your question sent in for review. If you prefer to ask questions in a message board environment and accept replies and comments from the community, that option is still available as well.

Army Counseling Online software products

ACO began with Counsel Quick, our counseling preparation software. Counsel Quick now exists in three separate volumes and is now joined by Award Quick and Rater Quick for awards and evaluations respectively.

We actively update and provide support for these products. This very blog exists primarily to announce patches to these programs and to explain new changes. We have also developed a new FAQ for ACO software. This page contains the answers to some of the common problems users bump into while using our software.

Sales and email support is still available through our retail partner and military books and digital media store GiPubs.com

In closing…

We hope that this redesign helps us deliver on these three points in 2011 better than we ever have before. If you have any suggestions about how we can improve Army Counseling Online, please let us know. We are always open to your suggestions because this site is for you, the Army leader.