Faith and Web

OK. That’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s the greatest web team I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. It’s the Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly Web Workers. They are at it again this year, and how I wish I could be with them. You can read more about the faces I miss so much here: About General Assembly 2007 Online. And here’s a bit of on-site news from Sharing the knowledge

In 2002, the first year I was one of the GA Web Workers, I was asked to tell my story at church shortly afterwards. I expect things remain much the same, so here it is:

In 1993, I started to email the denomination’s leadership. I did it mostly because it was cheaper than long-distance. But back then email was a novelty around the UUA and thus I came to the attention of Deb Weiner, their Head of Electronic Communications. Deb is now a dear friend, and this year, to my great delight, she asked me to help their very talented webmaster, Julie Albanese. I was one of a team of 17 volunteers and 4 staff. We were reporters, editors, photographers, videographers, technicians and webmasters, working elbow-to-elbow long into the night. Our tables, strewn with an astonishing variety of equipment and connected by a sea of wires, were in a circle. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the circle reminded me of our chalice, plus having the more practical result that we all faced each other, and communication flowed freely across and around the room.

The highpoint for me came Sunday morning. This was our first year to do live webcasting, and it was supposed to begin with “The Service of the Living Tradition” at 10:00 a.m. We were flying by the seat of our pants, and back in the web workers room, we discovered at the last minute that the rental machines couldn’t handle streaming video. 10:00 came and machines around the room were giving error messages. My laptop showed no broadcast. Then there was a frantic call from the convention center floor, some technological wonder was wrought in seconds flat, and suddenly, on my laptop, there was a gorgeous live video stream of the Service. A big cheer went up around the room and everyone clustered around my machine. Then emails started coming in from around the continent as grateful UUs let us know that even though they couldn’t be in Quebec, they were with us.

Today, this continues to be one of my favorite parts of the vast and rich website we produced. The videos (15 all told) are still there. So are over 75 stories, hundreds of photographs and countless handouts. There is something there for all UUs, including coverage of things others are talking about today. All you have to do is go to www.uua.org.

Here’s hoping for General Assembly 2008.

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JosiahRoad.com was released this week in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptists. It’s a web community built by their Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), featuring threaded discussion, a wiki and a popular concerns area.

The design is handsome and the code is clean. Even the favicon is a treat to look at.

What puzzles me is why it isn’t being used more. Of course, it’s very new.  And perhaps it hasn’t been officially launched or marketed to its target audience. It’s got some great ingredients to be a resource “to reach believers who might otherwise not relate to the organization’s work.”

For more information, see ERLC launches Web community.

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I’ve been asked to reflect on the redesigned United Church of Christ (UCC) website. What’s a church web diva to do? I could take the sledgehammer approach, like the endlessly astonishing Web Pages That Suck. Or I could do as my mother taught me – if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

In between… hmmm…. I’ve been channeling Emily Post, and it seems to me that having a process is the key. Come to think of it, it might help others in the fine art of assessing a website.

When I critique a site, I invariably look first at three things:

1. The quality of the code.
2. The architecture, in particular the navigation.
3. The look-and-feel.

If I can get past these three, then I evaluate what’s ultimately most important – the content.

So how does the UCC site measure up?

1. Peeking under hood, the code is not accessible and it does not validate. It doesn’t even have a doctype. Yikes! It’s a virtual certainty it will break cross platform and cross media. It’s not extensible, so it’s going to be particularly difficult to adapt for the future. Think the iPhone.
2. From a quick look at the architecture, I’d say the search engine is good, but the rest needs an overhaul. The use of Flash for navigation seems wrong for a site like this. [For more on this, see the update below.] Also, I don’t understand most of the labels in the primary navigation, and the parts of speech used are inconsistent. Then on secondary pages, I don’t see an obvious way to get back home.
3. Look-and-feel is the most dicey to assess. Me – I like the curves and simple palette, but continuous animation on the home page is off-putting. I love Flash, but even I don’t get why so many sites make this same mistake over and over again. See, for example, the recent bru-ha-ha about the 2012 Olympic site, which reportedly triggered epileptic seizures.
4. The content, I suspect, is excellent, but since I couldn’t get past the first three, nor do I belong to the UCC, that’s only a fuzzy sense.

In the end, what matters most is how well the site works for its primary audiences. In other words, how usable is it? When usability tests are well done, the results are invisible. When poorly done or not done at all, users trip — the site breaks in their browser, they can’t find what they are looking for and so on.

The UCC leadership clearly cares about their web presence, and they have a wealth of information and resources to share. If they asked me what to do, I would say run as fast as you can to hire a well-regarded website shop. Look for one that is solidly rooted in accessibility, standards and usability, e.g. Happy Cog Studios. Work with them first on a short-term coding band-aide, and then develop guidelines and procedures, rebuilding the site with an eye to the future.

Note: as this little post goes to press, I see the UCC home page has changed, now offering a choice for low vs. high bandwidth users. I guess it’s a band-aide, but I fear it’s the wrong one. At least, though, they are trying to get off the merry-go-round of poor code. Godspeed.

6/10 Updates: A quick clarification – it was the Rev. Scott Wells who requested my thoughts on this redesign. For those who are having problems accessing it, you might want to try some of Scott’s browser adjustment suggestions.

Also, the navigation issue which I had thought caused by Flash, Bill Siddall clarifies is caused by the Flash and menu animation competing for CPU cycles.

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I confess. I adore books. However, I’m a librarian, and I ascribe to Nancy’s Pearls of Wisdom (found on the Librarian Action Figure box). “Life is too short and the library is too large to ever read a book that you’re not thoroughly enjoying.”

Like Ms. Pearl, I’m ruthless, and if after 50 pages it’s not doing it for me, I stop. Thus I only read about 50 pages of most books.* That includes books about the web. I read a lot of them, and put even more to one side.

It occurred to me that you might find it helpful to know which books have my seal-of-approval. So I’ve done a new Bookshelf page for this site, culling out the best-of-the-best for those of you who like books and want to create a great website for your congregation or faith.

Do you have any particular favorites? Books I’ve overlooked? Suggestions? I’m all ears.

*Footnote: If you are over 50, Nancy Pearl’s further Rule of 50 can be invoked. “Subtract your age from 100 – the result is the number of pages you should need before deciding whether or not to continue on.”

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Thanks to ChurchCommunicationsPro, I just discovered a nifty web tool for finding local churches: Invite Someone to Church.

If you enter 37215, our church comes up in the top three. That would be Google at work, plus search engine optimization.

What this group has done is amazingly simple. Even I, a scripting rookie, could code this. They’re using PHP to enter a Google map search string, adding “church” plus the zip code to end of the string. But here’s the twist: they have signs and bumper stickers and cards with their URL to spread the word.

It sounds like a great idea to me. I’m going to ask our staff to request at least the bumper stickers. I want one for my car.

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Have you seen the new Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) website? After five long years of hard work, it was released into the Web this afternoon. You can still see its predecessor at archive.uua.org, where the UUA has cleverly stashed all of the now old pages in case of need.

Were the hundreds of thousands of hours put into this effort worth it? While it’s still too early to be certain, I’d be willing to bet the family farm on it – and I’m not a betting sort. Until today the Greek Orthodoxs had my favorite denominational site. But now the UUA has raised the bar for large faith-based websites. It’s elegant, it’s easy to navigate (especially for a site of 20,000+ pages) and it gives an instant sense of the spirit behind the faith.

Then there are the little touches – the things that make all the difference. Embedded throughout the site you will find quotes. Many inspire. All are thought-provoking and say something about this faith. But most amazing of all, they are contextual.

My favorite examples of the quotes-in-context are the pages about the site itself – in the section only geeks like me will care about. See, for instance, the Web Project Implementation Plan page.

Do you notice that blue box on the right near the top of the content? Hit refresh a few times, and see quotes by webmaster-favorites like webstyleguide.com go by.

On this page too, you can see at the bottom the project starting date of April, 2002. Mention is made of participants being “Unitarian Universalists but not employees of the UUA.” I was one of those participants. A year or so ago, I decided we must have set goals so lofty they were the undoing of any progress at all. Today, to my delight, I’m proved completely wrong.

But really, what’s most important about this page and section of the site, is how very professional they are – how cognizant the staff has been of all the many challenges of designing a great website – from empowering content stakeholders to complying with W3C standards. I wasn’t mistaken in thinking the goals were lofty. My mistake was in thinking they were impossibly high for a site so large.

Of course, it’s not perfect. I notice, for example, the Site Map is a bit limited, and I’ve no doubt there are other things to iron out. But this wonderful team (Julie Albanese, Kasey Melski, Deb Weiner, Mark Steinwinter and a host of others) has built a five-star foundation. I predict that not only will the site grow and thrive, it will help Unitarian Universalism grow and thrive.

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