Tech Talks

Welcome to the inaugural UUCB Tech Talks! This month I will highlight a few interesting areas of the new website, as well as go into plans for this column going forward.

As of the evening of Friday, August 18th, our new website is now live! I hope everyone has had a chance to check it out. I’ve been reading feedback from the form linked on this page (New Website), and it has been very helpful! Please keep sending in your suggestions and comments.

Here are some areas which I think will be of general interest:

It all starts with the home page. This will be most newcomers’ first experience of our congregation, and first impressions are very important. In recognition of this, we’ve designed this page to really lift up the level of activity we have here.

First, the new “This Sunday’s Service” area automatically displays the next service’s information as we’ve entered it on the upcoming service’s page. This reduces staff effort, as we only have to enter that description in one place. There are convenient buttons to see information about past and future services, to see more information about the upcoming service, and for general information applicable to newcomers.

The archive of past services has also been greatly streamlined. We see a list of titles and short descriptions, from which you can click to see all the information (including the order of service and archived video) all on one page. This should make it much easier for interested people to see what we’re about on Sunday mornings, and also for existing members to view the video archives.

Continuing on the home page, the next area we see are what I’ve called “cards”. These are places for a brief introduction to something happening at the church, and aren’t meant to be permanent. We will be updating these cards periodically, to make sure the homepage continues to feel fresh.

Below the cards, we have a list of upcoming events at the church. These events are automatically drawn from our church calendar, so this section never has to be manually updated.

I hope this provides some useful insight into how the home page (and some of our Sunday service information pages) are designed. We’ve worked hard to make the home page of our website a place where anyone can see a high-level overview of what the church is doing at any given moment, while requiring minimal staff effort to keep updated. This is the philosophy that we’ve used throughout the website, and we will continue to use as we add more features.

In the coming months, I plan to continue writing Tech Talks columns. Subjects will include how our live stream works, deep dives into the design of other kinds of pages you’ll find on our website, and other ways that technology can and does impact our congregation (from lighting in the meeting room, to multiplatform meetings, to other projects which are coming soon). I love to talk about this stuff, and to hear any feedback you might have. Feel free to reach out via email, which can be found on our church staff page.

Until next time,

Hans Kelson
Technology Coordinator
UUCB