I am so happy to present to you today the fully refurbished version of this website. A new design, a new back-end, lots of additional pictures and new pieces of content.

Why?

This is already a rather old website; the domain was registered on July 31, 2000. Since then, it has continued to expand, with ever more content created by significantly more members. Today, we have almost 2000 active users, 82000 page views a month, 10808 reviews, and xxx images. All the time, the technical back end of the website essentially stayed the same as when it was my private blog: a mostly self-coded website.

We had been working on a new version centered around a true content management system (CMS) on and off for the better part of seven years. It had been clear for a while that CMS features would benefit this site significantly and that many wishes for improvements were not possible in the legacy setup. But COVID, our travels, and the massive amount of data to migrate were insurmountable obstacles.

Then two things happened:

• In 2024, our hosting provider for a decade terminated our contract as we were crashing their servers due to the load. As such, we were forced to migrate to a new provider and our performance issues immediately disappeared. It also meant moving and this rekindled the migration activities.
• And the rise of AI has meant that the usual coding bottlenecks of an immature developer could be resolved with some time spent on the prompt. Indeed, there is no part of the new website that wasn't refactored by AI.

At some point in early 2025, we decided to aim for go-live with the 2025 WHC. We defined the core set of features for go live, we redid the branding and the layout, and we programmed.

New features and functional enhancements

While moving to a Python-based CMS may sound interesting to the geek and was necessary for operational reasons, there are some key features and enhancements we added for every traveller's benefit:

• Improved management of your reviews and accompanying images. There is now a publishing workflow with feedback and notifications. You can temporarily disable one of your reviews or fully delete it. You can also add full-size pictures now and add more than one per review.
• Commenting: You can now comment on reviews of everyone, enriching the interactivity of the website.
• Visits: Your visits are now clustered into "Visits", combining WHS and Tentative Sites into trips, for example: “India Trip 2024” or “WHC 2025”. You can also document revisits and store the date of visit.
• Search: A strong search engine leads you directly to specific pages. Plus, easy searching, sorting and filtering of lists, such as the long lists of countries like France and Spain, or the Connections.
• More Maps: We finally have overview maps of literally everything. All WHCs and all Connections now have their map. We moved from the prohibitively priced Google Maps offering to Leaflet/OpenStreetMaps. Small caveat: All place names are written in local letters (Chinese, Cyrillic), ....
• More Map Features: We are using a geo information system (PostGIS) for our location data, providing a richer map experience. We can show areas such as core and buffer zones. We can do geo filters (all sites within 200km or within the borders of Germany). And we allow for many new location types, such as Points-of-Interest (POIs) (we have added the Plaques here!) or transport locations. We also redid the map icons and the map layout. For a preview of things to come, open the country page for Czechia or take a look at Prague.
• WHC: Fitting to the upcoming WHC 2025, we offer an extended coverage of the WHC Sessions, including an overview of ‘Events’ (Referrals, Deferrals, etc) and a live tracker of the Forum discussion.
• Enhanced mobile design: We redid the whole user experience with both mobile and large screens in mind. We also updated the branding for worldheritagesite.org.

We’re not done yet

The true power of the new version lies in the enabling of future expansions in content. We aim to:

• Have maps displaying the full core zones and POIs.
• Share responsibilities, with members becoming responsible for a country, connections, links, ...
• Allow for storing visited locations.
• Add travel information to the country pages. Allow more user content, e.g., a blog post on a trip.
• Adding tentative site connections.
• Even more photos,
• Migrate and fully embed the Forum.

We have moved the migration of a few functionalities from the previous version of the website to Release 2 (later this summer). This includes the Community Statistics (per WHC, per Connection) and showing photos with the locations on the map, such as the Plaque photos.

Known Issues

All core features should work and we will fix short notice. Some findings we are aware of:

• We know some boxes don't align and need proper spacing. 
• OpenStreetMap provides only maps using a local script. There are some ways of fixing that, but we won't be able to do this in the short term.

Made possible by

• All community members who shared full-size versions of photos on my request. More are needed.
• All WhatsApp group members who participated in User Acceptance Testing.
• Ian, for sharing the geodata he gathered over the years, which includes the core zones of many of Czechia's WHS and the coordinates of Former TWHS. 
• Philipp, who came up with the new design and displayed a keen eye for detail
• Nan, who spent unbelievable amounts of time on both the configuration of the infrastructure and the programming of, well, everything that isn’t standard within the CMS, plus converting the visual designs into CSS.

First steps...

I can understand that in the beginning, you may not know where to find what; that’s why there’s an FAQ. Additional questions and reporting of bugs can be done on the Forum.

To get started:

1. Reset your password. Prerequisite. Your old password won't work anymore.
2. Update your profile. Provide a profile picture. Update your UserPage, also with a photo.
3. Update your visits. We tried to identify visits, but you may want to redo the visits cleanly.
4. Update your reviews. We now allow significantly higher quality photos. Replace the old, tiny pictures if you have a better one. Also, reviews now have titles. Think about updating it.

Enjoy.

My first visit to Iraq was in 2014, when I covered semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. In April 2025, I went to what in tourism is known as ‘Federal Iraq’ (although that would be a more appropriate name for the entire country, including the Kurdish governorate). As it covers the major sites of Ancient Mesopotamia, it is definitely the most interesting part and it holds 5 out of the country's 6 WHS. Herewith are some tips for travelling to Iraq as a WH Traveller.

1. Don’t expect it to be pretty

Most of it is a typical flat Arab desert landscape, littered with plastic waste. The monuments generally also lack the refinement and colour of those in neighbouring Iran. Unless roadside portraits of Shia clerics particularly enamour you, your best bet for beauty are the statues and sculptures in the National Museum in Baghdad.

2. The safety situation normalizes rapidly

Many western countries (such as Germany, Australia, USA) still raise a red flag for all travel to Iraq, although the UK , for example, has lowered its warnings for the southern areas, including Baghdad, Babylon, Najaf, and the Marshes. On the ground, it all feels calm and safe and the people are friendly to foreigners, no matter where they are from. Nowhere does it feel oppressive, and you can walk the streets freely. Our local guide said that it had been like this for about 4-5 years, and that it normalizes more and more every quarter. The only reminder of worse times is the high number of checkpoints along the roads between governorates and while entering cities. These do slow you down a bit, but we passed all without incident within a few minutes and they never did look at us individually (just a chat with the driver/local guide and browse through a selection of the passports).

3. There’s a lot of potential for more WHS

The coverage of the most important periods in Iraqi history is fairly balanced, but 6 WHS isn’t a lot for a country of its size and importance (Iran has 28 WHS!). I think Iraq can easily have 8-10 more. Ordered by historical period, candidates are:

• Prehistory (0): the Shanidar Cave as an important Neanderthal site (one of the largest single-site collections of Neanderthal fossils ever found), not on T List but also a prominent role in the Iraq National Museum.
• Ancient Mesopotamia (3): Sumerian at Ur/Uruk , Assyrian at Ashur , Neo-Babylonian at Babylon . Well-covered, but as it is Iraq’s unique specialty, maybe Nineveh , Nimrud or Nippur could be added as well (though these are in a poor state).
• There’s nothing from the 2 centuries-long rule of the Persian Achaemenids: worth a mention here are the rock-cut tombs of Qizqapan in Kurdistan region.
• Classical Antiquity (1): the Parthians at Hatra , but there’s none from the Sassanids, this should be covered by Ctesiphon (not on T List).
• Islamic Conquest (1): Abbasids ( Samarra ), could/should have Old Baghdad too.
• Turkic and Mongol dynasties (0): the TWHS Old City of Mosul should cover this, as its landmark mosque is from the Turkic Zengic dynasty.
• Ottoman Empire (1): Erbil WHS has an Ottoman street plan. The Baghdad and Mosul sites also have significant Ottoman remains.
• 20th century (0): could be covered by some sites in continuous use, such as the Yezidi Lalish Temple or the Wadi Al-Salam Cemetery in Najaf (both on T List)

4. Other factors have caused more lasting damage than the 2003-2017 wars

Any damage from the 2003 Invasion and the subsequent Iraqi Civil War on the Iraqi (T)WHS now seems to have been erased or at least patched up as best as they could. Even the impact of the ISIS iconoclasts in the end was fairly limited: only Mosul and Nimrud still show the signs. Still, the state of conservation of all sites leaves a lot to be desired. A particular Iraqi problem is what to do with the unbridled reconstructions of poor quality, which were popular during the Saddam era. ICOMOS seems to suggest that removing them would be best in the end, but that would be a hell of a job. Babylon (photo 3) is covered with them and also at other sites, they are prominently visible. I also found it remarkable how little excavation work has been done at virtually all sites. Site interpretation is generally quite poor too, so better to read up beforehand.