Welcome to the new University Unitarian Church website!

It is with great anticipation and excitement that we launch this new site for our church community and especially for those interested in becoming acquainted with UUC.

Project

[0]Through some amazing circumstances of shared interest, a team of people that included Kathleen Cromp, Byron Krystad, and myself, Laura Sager, came together in the fall of 2006 to begin work on a new and more useful church website. With Tom Sutberry and others from the church staff, plus a group of interested members, we proceeded to brainstorm. Kathleen is very active in membership activities, particularly with new members. Byron and I both have technology and writing backgrounds. (By funny coincidence, Byron and I were both serving our first year as UUC board members, although this web project was entirely independent of our roles on the board.)

Membership team leaders had often heard that the web was the first way that interested people learned about our church. Unfortunately, the website at that time was old and static, and it was difficult for the office staff to update. The site simply didn’t have the design or capacity to grow or gain new features. Only a new site would allow that. (We were so lucky that Byron was able to clean up the old website enough to see us through this past year!)

Background

To launch a new website, our team did a lot of background work. I interviewed office staff about their needs and maintenance issues, and also talked with ministerial staff about what they wanted in a website. I pored over several great documents, including a strategic plan, interviews with elders and youth, and more. Our team conducted a church-wide survey between services on Sundays in November. Kathleen provided many insights from those attending new member meetings. Byron and other team members talked with the staff about technology requirements. I ranked and profiled more than 25 websites of large UU and other churches and similar nonprofits.

With plenty of information in hand, we set out to think about the content and the structure the website should have, looking hard at the content that was currently available. Using an idea from John Burkhardt, who directs the website for the University of Washington Alumni Association, we conducted a “page test.” With UU members as test subjects, we looked at different topics and how they might best be arranged. We learned so much! A church member—and, not incidentally, a UW professor of computer and information science who teaches classes in user-interface design—was one of many helpful participants.

After we mapped and analyzed all we’d learned, we made many adjustments to our original thinking. Finally, we drafted a layout, a plan of the website as we had envisioned it. And that is essentially, with months of refinement, what you see on the site today.

With basic concept in hand, Kathleen and Byron met with several web development firms in Seattle. We ultimately chose DigitalAid (http://www.digitalaid.net [1]), a small company that specializes in supporting socially responsible businesses and nonprofits. Their clients have included the Social Justice Fund Northwest (Seattle), Center for Social Justice (Seattle), and Partnership for Safety and Justice (Portland), to name a few. University Unitarian presented a unique challenge as DigitalAid's first church project.

The work from then on was refinement, content development, discussions, and meetings. Kathleen managed training sessions for volunteers and staff. Byron wrote up a detailed set of procedures and workflow for web team members and office staff, so that they can update the site and add new content whenever they wish.

The staff and the web team worked hard, learning the editing system and uploading content to the site, verifying administrative processes, and asking for ministerial feedback and approval on the final design. As we approached the last days of summer, Ellen Blackstone took on the task of reviewing all our content in the role of site editor, as we posted content during the month of August.

Design

Design is naturally one of the critical steps in creating a website. “Look and feel” can be such a personal thing that we wanted to free the designer to create something beautiful, usable, and reflective of UUC. We wrote a design specification based on all our member research and then refined it.

Overall, we wanted the site’s design to be:

• Warm and friendly
• Contemporary, clear, and understandable
• Reflective of colors that evoke the Pacific Northwest: earth tones with the brightness of blues or greens, but also shades of brown (wood beams of church), grey (stones of the memorial garden), and rust/bronze (the bell and exterior sculpture).

And we took inspiration from our beautiful building, designed by Paul Hayden Kirk:

• Kirk’s “delicate wooden modernism”
• A very crisp, clean look: “Tailored”
• Simple rectilinear geometry of Modernism
• Honoring the human response in his architecture
• Warmth, screening, modular systems, large simple windows and doors
• Integration of inside and outside living spaces.

We hope you will find understanding in our approach and that you will appreciate the work that went into creating it. We think the designer did an amazing job of evoking some of the less tangible aspects of our church community.

Features

The site has several features that were requested by church members:

• A complete and dynamic listing of all groups and programs active in our church community
• A comprehensive and interactive church calendar
• The convenience of site-wide full-text search

We will profile these features and more in upcoming months, but we hope you will take time now to explore the site and experience the richness of the features themselves.

The Launch of the New Website

It’s so exciting to have our “launch” during Fall Homecoming!

I would like to say that this team – Kathleen, Byron, Ellen, and DigitalAid – has been the most fruitful and sharing group I have worked with. The entire “job” has been a pleasure and a joy for me, and I think my team members as well.

We welcome your interest and questions about the site. Please contact any web team member.

Thank you, all!

Laura Sager