Beginning Friday, October 20, the homepage of the Iowa Conference website will feature a new look. With clearer access to interior sections the refreshed presentation will include links to separate sections for the vision, mission, and wildly important goal, features, current news, and a comprehensive index at the bottom of the page that includes a “subscribe” button to Conference publications.
“It’s important for the website to support the Conference vision, mission and wildly important goal,” said Dr. Arthur McClanahan, Director of Communications. “The
Strategic Priorities (2013) call for Conference efforts to align to support our world-transforming existing and emerging communities of faith as well as equipping transformational leaders. This step of revising the look of the website’s homepage creates clearly visible sections to do precisely that.”
Interior pages of the website will have a cleaner look. The former gray background has been eliminated to be a completely white page. In addition, the
news section now includes a list of topics in the right column. Clicking one of the keywords will open a new news page with stories connected to the topic. “This is a work in progress,” noted Associate Director of Communications, Liz Winders. “While this isn’t a wholesale revision of the Conference website, it will become easier to find related items.”
A larger banner will be displayed across the top of the page. The images will reflect timely news and topics. Some will be “clickable,” leading to an interior page. The image will change every seven seconds. Other website changes include more direct access to multimedia. There’s a new
video page that offers a thumbnail image related to each video as well as a brief description. The photos page will open directly to the FLICKR gallery of albums of images. There is also a new audio podcast page. In addition to that, the podcast is now directly available in
iTunes and
Google Play music.
The top ribbon will include links to key sections of the website. One can be clicked to print the currently-displayed page and another that will instantly translate the content of the entire website into a chosen language other than the default English.
Work will continue in the coming months to further refine the Conference website and improve the organization and search capacity. The ability to custom-access portions of the website, based on a viewer’s needs and preferences, will also be developed. “All of this is being done to adapt the now more-than-four-year-old website to better inform and resource Iowa’s United Methodists and guests,” Dr. McClanahan concluded.
