As you may have noticed, the website looks a little different today. In collaboration with the Parish Council, our former webmasters, Ann & Issy and myself, Matt Goldspink, we’ve worked to update the website to future proof the community. We’d like to share some of the new features:
A Rebranded Site
We’ve tried to keep the structure of the pages the same, but give them a new lick of paint.
We’ve aimed to keep key information as quickly accessible as possible, so mass times at the top of the first page with all the readings for the week.
Mobile friendly
The old website unfortunately didn’t resize nicely on mobiles and we’re very much in the age of mobile! The new site is designed to resize and look good on mobile while keeping all the same information available.
Search
Our old site had a lot of great information but you had to click around a lot to find it. The new site includes a powerful search out of the box. Unfortunately it doesn’t search inside of the PDF’s of newsletter’s yet, but it will come soon.
Improved accessibility for disabled and visually impaired users
The old site was very functional, but for our disabled and visually impaired users it unfortunately had a low score for accessibility. For example text was too small, screen readers wouldn’t follow the page in an order that was natural for blind people and there were a lot of missing features that these users need. The new site can be navigated around purely by a keyboard, for users who struggle with a mouse and screen readers happily read out the key parts of the site these need.
Easier to contribute to
I don’t think people will truly appreciate the work Ann and Issy have put in all these years updating the website. They inherited something that by modern website standards was archaic and had to dig through huge amounts of code to just add a simple news item! Here’s an example of the thousands of lines they search through to find where to insert it.
The new website is built using WordPress, a modern website builder which powers approximately 64.5% of websites in the whole internet! With that comes a lot of simple but powerful features that will allow our parish to grow and contribute. For example you can edit any page of the entire with live previews, easily upload new pdfs for newsletter. Individual groups can write and maintain their own pages and more people can contribute more easily than ever before.
Which leads up to our final point…
We need your help!
With Ann and Issy stepping down, this is a great opportunity for a new set of webmasters to help take over managing the content of the site. Some experience of websites is useful, especially if you’re familiar with WordPress, but it’s not necessary. We do need people who are organised and can help ensure that the details for each week are available on the website. We also would ideally like more than one person so that more people can contribute.
- Manage the webmaster email account
- Parishioners send updates they want to here to be added to the site
- Add to the Google Calendar associated with this account upcoming events
- Upload newsletters, readings, intercessions, etc
- These usually come to the above email address. Uploading on the new website is a very simple set of drag/drop and save operations.
- Add events and news for each month
- Again these are all sent to the webmaster email account and just need to be transcribed to the website.
- Delegate and help people learn to contribute and update their own groups details.
- We really want to empower our parishioners who manage and look after the different groups to be able update their own part of the website. Previously these contributions all went through Ann & Issy due to the sheer technical overhead it needed. Now we can let parishioners self serve and update as they need.
Don’t worry you won’t be thrown in to this all on your own. We’ll help you get up to speed and be there to support you.
If you’re interested or want to find out more please email webmaster@stalbanmacc.org.uk
Do it for the gram… we need some new Tweeters!
In addition we also need some people to help manage the social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
If you’re interested or want to find out more please email webmaster@stalbanmacc.org.uk