Well, as promised the new web site design for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been rolled out late today just in time for the start of the General Assembly meeting beginning on Saturday.

My first impression is very positive.  It has interactive media on the front page, a nice clean feel at the top, and good navigation links.  It is a bit more cluttered at the bottom of the front page.  A little checking shows that the front page style is not propagated throughout the site — There is a new style that differs from the front for the GAMC, and the OGA pages still retain the same look and feel as they did yesterday.

As for URL’s there is a new system that seems logical as far as I have explored it.  Previously a web page was a subdirectory of the pcusa.org address.  Now it is a subdomain of the site.  For example, the General Assembly page was www.pcusa.org/ga219 and it is now ga219.pcusa.org and the OGA was www.pcusa.org/oga and it similarly is now oga.pcusa.org.  For simple cases like these two the old addresses forward.  However, more complicated cases do not follow this rule:  www.pcusa.org/research does forward, but not to research.pcusa.org but to gamc.pcusa.org/ministries/research.  And not everything forwards — a lot of my previous links are now broken.  For example, the documents I linked to earlier today are still generally valid links, although one is now broken, and the nice index page for comparative statistics is gone!  There is now a resource page that lists each table seperatly.  That may take some time to get through.  And one other inconsistancy — if you want to get to the current GA it is ga219.pcusa.org as I mentioned above.  All the previous GA’s are oga.pcusa.org/ga216 , or whatever GA you want.

The one other feature of the web site is the quick and easy access to the store.  (And while advertised as a ministry of the GAMC it has its own subdomain and is not under the GAMC domain.)  I would also note that the other arms, like the Presbyterian Foundation, PILP, and Publishing appear to retain their old styles. (And when I typed “investment and loan program” in the search it returned a very plain page with the styles stripped out or invalid.)  Also the new search is not nearly as useful.  The previous one returned a ministry arm, committee or office link at the top if it matched your search above the usual list of documents.  Now you just get the documents listed out.

I’ll keep looking but it will take a little getting used to.  And I don’t know how many of the items I mention above are bugs and how many are features.  I’m sure there is more testing and patching to do so I look forward to the continued work.  And I’ll start looking to fix all my broken links…