TransformingTheChurch.org New Web Design Implemented As Planned

3/14/2013

Abstract:

As previously announced, we completed the implementation of the new design just after midnight, March 14th. The evolution was completed smoothly and without incident.

Click Here To See The List Of All News Releases

Full News Release:

As previously announced, we completed the implementation of the new design just after midnight, March 14th. The evolution was completed smoothly and without incident.

After the new design was implemented, the entire site was tested across five of the most popular browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera) and the first phase of quality-assurance testing was completed as part of this evolution. More rigorous testing will be performed the rest of this week. We may be tweaking small things during this testing period but these changes will be minor and will not impact your usage of the site.

Also, as part of this re-design project, we added new content to the public section of the website. Now that the web designers/programmers have finished their work, the site is now back in the hands of our authors/editors to produce new content of the site. In the short term, you may run across a few "stub pages" with partial or incomplete text on these pages. These pages will be completed and the new content added in the coming week.

As you tour the new website design, you will notice a series pages that with large dynamic regions on the top of the pages. See:

https://www.transformingthechurch.org/
https://www.transformingthechurch.org/pages/curricula_section_home
https://www.transformingthechurch.org/pages/courses_section_home
https://www.transformingthechurch.org/pages/communities_section_home
https://www.transformingthechurch.org/pages/events_section_home
https://www.transformingthechurch.org/pages/catalog
https://www.transformingthechurch.org/pages/platform_section_home

These large dynamic graphic ad regions will be changed out from week to week to highlight new content added in the interior of the website.

Also, as we launch new and highly-dynamic Connected Community content this Spring, we have implemented a “Happening Now!” to highlight upcoming events. See:

https://www.transformingthechurch.org/pages/happening_now

This page will change multiple times per week as new events in our communities and Virtual Classroom occur or are announced.

These four pages will focus the public on the mainstays of the website that occur behind our registration “wall;” they will highlight the unseen largest part of our “iceberg” that is below the surface:

• Courses
• Communities
• Events

The purpose of the design is to entice members of the public to use our free registration and become members of our Connected Community.

We hope you enjoy the new design!

The new design uses the most-current best practices of website coding and will allow us to implement new and exciting features and functions. Some of our future enhancements will be subtle and gradual as we add new presentation features to our content’s presentation. Other enhancement will be far more noticeable.

Within weeks, you will see the first of these major new enhancements when we launch our new mobile site. Currently, all users are served one set of pages to all devices, desktop or mobile. Also, like most legacy websites, our one set of pages have been designed for desktop browsers. When our mobile site is completed, all of our web pages will have a have a unique design that is optimized for mobile devices such as smartphones. Through the advanced capabilities of our content management system (CMS), will serve web pages that are optimized for your device, desktop or mobile. Our CMS allows us to author pages once and the CMS will serve those pages to multiple devices using a unique design and navigation that is customized and optimized for each type of device used to access the site.

Serving all of our pages customized for mobile browsers completes our support mobile devices. The first step in this evolution happened earlier this year when we started supporting both desktop and mobile devices for all of our video media. Serving customized pages optimized for mobile devices completes our philosophy of supporting “any device at any time.”

Additional features will be added throughout the Spring of 2013 and will be announced as we add them to the public website, our communities and our Virtual Classrooms.