Welcome to the new-look St Michael’s Church website
You are one of the first people to visit the new-look church website. We’ve spent over a year working on this design – which should make everything more accessible, particularly for those who use smartphones and tablets.
As with all updates – it will take us a little while to get used to the changes. We will all need to be a little patient as the new design settles in. Thank you for your understanding and care.
Menus
Hopefully everything you need can be found by clicking one of the 5 coloured menu buttons at the top of every page. Or you could try using the search button to find what you’re looking for. If you get stuck, please accept our apologies – we are continuing to make corrections and improvements all the time.
Feedback
If there’s anything you particularly like, or dislike about the new layout and navigation – we’d love to hear from you. Similarly, if anything appears to be not working, do let us know.
Please contact us with any comment using the feedback form below.
Between us we’ll work to make the website clear, accessible, welcoming and informative for as many people as possible.
Thank you.
Feedback form
Advantages of the new website design
Accessibility
The underlying principle of the update to the website is to get more of the right communications, to more people, in more ways.
In the last year we have had 14,000 visitors to our website with 60% of visitors accessing the website from a mobile phone or tablet.
Responsive layout design. A major feature of the updated website is that the design is now fully responsive and will optimise the website layout to the size of the screen you are viewing it on. Making content more readable, especially on mobile phones.
Responsive text size. The website now fully responds to browsers that have adjusted the font size setting, so if you like your font size a little larger (or smaller) the website now obliges on all pages.
Menu structure. The menus have been simplified and consolidated to the top bar of the website with 5 coloured menu buttons. You will find everything you need from one of these 5 menus. The menu structure also responds to the size of the screen you are viewing it on and optimises the experience.
It’s fast. The updated website uses the very latest website scripting standards which are claimed to be 30% faster than the predecessor. So you will benefit as a visitor with faster web page load times, which means you get to see the information you came to find quicker.
Flexibility
Maintenance. The updated website has been built with flexibility in mind, to allow the structure of menus, headers and footers to all be updated from the admin panel without having to be web scripting ninja. You will notice that some things (e.g. church services) appear on more than one menu. This is not a mistake and is intentional to help visitors find things and it just highlights the flexibility we have with the new menu structure.
Home page. The front home page has a “priority 9” grid for the most important current communications headlines and links. This is easy to change and adapt to make the home page more dynamic and more effective in communicating key messages.
ChurchSuite. All of the events for the church that are created in ChurchSuite are now automatically imported into the website, to allow the latest events to be shown dynamically in web pages. Check out the Rhythms of Grace page under the ‘When’ section, where you can see the dates for the next events. This no longer has to be manually entered and is automatically pulled through from ChurchSuite and displayed.
Security
The site is more secure. The updated website has been built with security in mind. Using the very latest web scripting standards, which have security at the core, combined with back-end security measures to ensure that our databases and files remain safe. This has been combined with SSL/ HTTPS encryption for the entire site so your interaction with the site is secure. Check out your address bar for the padlock sign.
Backups. The updated website has a robust backup approach to ensure that should something go wrong then the site can be up and running again with minimal downtime.
Removal of personal data. No emails or personal details are stored on website, with all correspondence now managed through contact forms. Rotas have also now been removed from the website and all rotas should now be accessed via login to ChurchSuite or through email.
It was free!
One of the best things about the updated site is that it has not cost the church anything! It has been developed entirely in-house by an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers who have a heart for communicating the good news of God’s work at St Michael’s to everyone who visits this site.
Thank you for reading and don’t forget to send us any feedback using the form above.
St Michael’s Web Team