CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello has unveiled a new website as they are hallmark in Virginia for America250, the 250th anniversary this coming July 4 of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“Folks across the country are celebrating the 250th, but our guy right here in Charlottesville wrote it, he wrote the Declaration, and so we think we’re a particularly special place to mark this milestone and want to invite everybody out to see what’s new,” Jennifer Lyon, Director of Marketing and Communications at Monticello told Cville Right Now.
Website Content Manager Beth Sawyer said they began working on the project at the beginning of last year and started doing the work in earnest with a team of four in August. She said the process was not starting everything over again but building on what was great about the previous site, adding they were fortunate enough to be working with a great foundation.
“We strove to add new features to mostly connect with users, improve navigation, keep the website engaging, and we really want to always make sure we’re connecting with our users and that they’re getting to the information they want in a clear and helpful way,” Sawyer said.
She added that for people visiting the historic house, there’s an improved calendar of events and itineraries curated to specific interests which helps visitors of all ages make the most of their time on the mountaintop.
“One thing I personally love is we have some really engaging user maps,” she said, “so you can have like a drone view of the mountaintop with little clickable pop-ups to give you information about different sites.”
Sawyer said they’ve also worked on making the site better to use for researchers with improvements to the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia.
“With more than 1,100 entries, the updated encyclopedia is now more seamlessly integrated across the website through tagging and connections to related content, such as blog posts and Monticello’s In Bloom plant database,” she said. “Even improving little things like pop-up footnotes so you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the page, and again just really trying to connect users to information in a clear, clean way.”
Sawyer noted they’ve seen increased web traffic starting in 2025 due to more people searching the web for information relating to the 250th Anniversary, whether in relation to Monticello or not.
“I never would ever have to write web content with the word ‘semiquincentennial’ in it, so that’s been exciting, too,” Sawyer said.
A Monticello release stated the redesign brings a “fresh and contemporary look,” to the site, which includes new, high-resolution image and draws its color pallet from the house itself, like the “Monticello yellow” of the Dining Room and the “true grass green” floor of the Entrance Hall.
