Introducing our new website!

Over a year in the making, our website has been rebuilt completely from scratch on a brand-new platform. In creating it, we didn't simply copy everything over from the old site - we worked from the ground up to create a clean, modern site that encompasses the functions we feel a website needs to serve us, and then from there we ported over the content that suited it.

New Site Highlights (The Good)

The new site brings countless improvements over the old one. Here are just a few:

• All pages are built from the ground up to look good regardless of the device you're viewing them on (computers, tablets, and phones).

• Our new Sunday Services page allows you to easily view previous services, including not just the recorded video, but also their offering split and buttons to view their historical Orders of Service.

• Our News page shows you a feed of all of our news, across every category - with a simple category menu to narrow down the feed if desired. On the old site, you would need to check news feeds on each subject's page.

• Our Events page allows you to see upcoming one-off events and RSVP or buy tickets to them, directly through our website. While you're there, don't forget to buy your tickets to our Chili Cook-off and Feast!

• Site load times are dramatically improved over the old site, and page-to-page transitions should be even snappier.

• The new platform brings a host of new features we have future plans for but aren't taking advantage of yet. You'll just have to stay tuned!

The State Of Things (The Bad)

The new site is still a work-in-progress - some pages you might expect to find are not currently present. This does not mean they didn't make the cut, it just means we weren't able to have them fully ready by the time we were planning to go live. There are many pages that aren't currently live that we're working on behind the scenes, especially for welcoming newcomers and covering our congregation's extensive history.

You may have noticed that changes to the old site were a bit slow over the past few months, and some pages were stripped down and consolidated. This was all because we were focusing our efforts on the new site behind the scenes, and it didn't make sense to take away development time from the new site to fix something that broke on the old one unless it was critical. Now that the new site is live, you can expect rapid improvements to be made nearly every day.

The State Of Things (The Ugly)

All of the news articles were imported from the old site, but the process was not perfect.

• Some information, like post titles and summaries, were distorted in weird (albeit consistent) ways, mainly when special characters were involved.

• Cover images (the image that displays when the article is viewed on the News page, or shown in the weekly Newsletter) and authors were lost entirely.

• Post URLs were not directly imported, but since they're based off of the post title, many were re-generated exactly the same. However, because of the aforementioned title issues, and the fact that URLs are based on the title, some of them were malformed and do not match the old site. This means that, without correction, some links you visit (like if you were to click on an article's Read More button in last week's Newsletter) may not take you to the desired page.

• Some post formatting was not perfectly maintained. The new platform does allow a great degree of freedom in post formatting and structure, but the conversion process from the old site was imperfect.

Fixing each of these issues is a completely manual, very laborious process that we'll be undertaking over the next few weeks. The last two weeks of posts are already fixed, so these symptoms should be relatively minor unless you really start digging.

Outside of the article issues, a few pages are still a work-in-progress, namely the individual Programs pages and the Music Program page. Expect them to look nicer over time.

If you happen to notice any other issues with the site, or have any feedback in general, please let Alex or Nick know by contacting web@muuf.org.