Within the last couple of weeks the Church of Scotland has rolled out a redesigned web site.  It has a simple and clean look with great consistency between pages.  One of the more interesting features is that many of the pages have contact information for relevant individuals right at the bottom of the page rather than in some central directory page.

I have to say a word about navigation because they appear to have put a lot of thought into it.  When you go to the home page you don’t see top nav links for any of the “institution” of the church.  Instead you see topics, especially topics someone not connected to the church might be interested in.  Clicking through to the next level you get to much the same type of thing but now splitting out that topic.  For example, if you click the top nav bar for “Connect” your navigation choices on the left are now “Young Church,” “Emerging Church,” “Rural Church,” etc.  It is not until the next level down that you start to really see program names, such as under “Young Church ” you then get “Clann,” “National Youth Assembly,” and “Cosycoffeehouse.”  You can argue that this is too many clicks to get what you want, but it also struck me that the titles were nice and descriptive allowing you to narrow down what you wanted before you got the cute program names that would only be meaningful to insiders.  Another subtle example of this is that the guides to various liturgical days and seasons are not arranged according to the liturgical calendar but alphabetically.

Along those lines, it also appears clear that the site is primarily focused on those that are not familiar with the church.  The emphasis does not appear to be as much about news, announcements and resources as it is about connecting with the general population, introducing the church to those who are not familiar with it, and talking about its ministries within Scottish society.  Have a look at the “Speak Out ” page, which is about the church speaking out, not as much people speaking back to, or through, the church.   The page begins:

The Church of Scotland plays an important role in Scottish and
international life. It is involved in a range of political, ethical and
social issues and campaigns which affect peoples’ lives, such as human
rights, poverty, climate change, health and education.

It then starts talking about specific ministry initiatives and structure.

For those familiar with the old site, like my regular search for polity or GA details, the new site will probably take some getting used to.  They have a helpful page, the “Help! ” page, to give you some orientation to the new site. Nice touch.  I also found that the navigation links at the bottom reflect the old organization more than the top or side bars do. 

The site structure seems to have changed significantly so that my old links and bookmarks don’t work and there does not appear to be redirection. The extranet site appears to be gone and the information rolled into the main one, such as the Acts of the General Assembly page, making it one unified site.  In my survey of the site it appears that most of the previous material is there somewhere, including some behind a password protected members’ section.  My biggest complaint about the redesign is that there is still no newsfeed, Atom or RSS, for the Kirk’s news stories and nothing that I have found so far promoting social media for the denomination.

The redesign of the web site is probably not a surprise.  Back in late 2009 there was a bit of a dust-up when a design firm let it be known in a trade journal that they were doing work for the Kirk to update their image.  The Kirk was not pleased because it wanted to make this info known on its own terms and tried to retrieve their payment for the services, a claim the courts later denied.  Clearly the Kirk has been conscious of their public image and working on it.

So I look forward to surfing around the new site, getting to know it better, and especially looking for information that has been added.  It is an interesting implementation of a particular emphasis and I hope it gets the intended results for the Kirk.