My name is Jim Grindell and I have recently agreed to assist Affinity with making the website a more useful resource for the community it serves. This is something of a test post to find out who (if anyone) is using or checking these forums and to ask for your honest and helpful suggestions for the site. Any takers?
This is a post from Don Gregson who couldn’t post into this forum himself because of a website permissions problem (now fixed!).
My suggestions / comments are:
HOME PAGE:
1. I would very much prefer the Home Page to be more generic, or better yet more dynamic. The current reference to SORs is an important issue I fully agree but was really a somewhat time-bound item which it could be argued is ‘past its sell-by date’ in so far as it pleads for steps to be taken by the Affinity constituency before government action was taken whereas that action has, sadly, already been taken. If I am missing something here please forgive me.
2. Concerning the idea of a dynamic Home page I love the approach taken by Wikipedia http://www.en.wikipedia.org so much so that I routinely access their home page daily!! They display 5 features and 4 of them change daily (i. iii. iv. and v.)and the other one (ii.) adds new items as they come to hand and drops off the commensurate number of old items.
The five sections are:
i. Today’s Feature Article
ii. In the News
iii. Did you know
iv. On this Day
v. Today’s Featured Picture
Now I fully recognise that we do not have the resources to accomplish such a comprehensive and daily coverage as that but is there any way we could partially emulate that approach?
How about 4 regular items:
i. ‘This week’s featured Partner/Associate’ – we currently have 20 Partners and 29 Associates. In faith that that number will grow to 52 over the next year could we not feature one per week?
ii. ‘This week’s featured Article’ – the four Affinity teams have a growing number of articles posted in their respective sections on the site, could attention be drawn to one of these article on a revolving (weekly) basis by means of a brief annotation?
iii. ‘Anniversaries this month’ – for as long as I can remember, every January issue of ‘Evangelicals Now’ features Christian historical anniversaries compiled by Joy Horn. She clearly has an extensive data base and may be willing to provide a monthly feature for our site.
iv. ‘Events this month’ – a calendar item of Christian events for the month ahead from Affinity Partners and Associates.
I recognise that we would need the active co-operation of Partners and Associates to accomplish items i. and iv. above but hope we could enthuse them to participate with us in this.
COMMUNITY and MARKET PLACE:
I find these features are too hidden, in that they are not visible on the Home page and even when they are presented after proceeding from the Home page access is not straight forward. Could not their availability be made much more user-friendly? Can there be a link from the Home page? Can they be re-generated in some creative way?
One small addition to my post of 25th August (re website improvements) concerning suggested items for a dynamic Home Page, the Featured Partner or Associate piece would have a link to the website of that Partner or Associate and the Featured Article annotation would have a link to the full article.
Don.
So far, a stunningly quiet response! I can only assume that very few people are even aware of these forums.
I have just changed the home page back to its former glory, which includes reference to recent articles and recent posts on the forums so maybe someone will drop in.
Would any Mac users care to comment on the formatting of the site? How does it look for you (I heard rumour that it looked terrible)?
If you could give brief details of which Mac you have, which OS and what browser that would be helpful.
Good to see the changes on the Home page, Jim, ... however ... I prefer the picture of the ‘read Bible’ over the ‘Animals’ ... and ... I would still prefer to see a link to ‘Community’ and ‘Market Place’ on the Home page rather than having to go in one more level from the Home page before they are revealed. Any chance of this?
Don.
The rationale behind the animals was just to try and get some variety of images that illustrate affinity (they are all groups of animals). There was a topic somewhere on this forum about what the homepage picture(s) should be but there wasn’t much response as far as I remember. Any new ideas would be welcome.
I have changed the home page to add direct links to the community section. If you are not logged in, there are links to the registration page and 3 of the forums, if you are logged in, you just get the 3 forum links. I could put all the forums on there, but figured that 3 might be enough. On the logged in page, you already have the latest posts from any forum shown on the bottom left anyway,
Jim.
Brilliant! Big improvements re access to the Forums, Jim.
My suggestion was to use the picture that has been on the home page during the time that the SORs item was featured on the home page i.e. the hands holding an open Bible. However, I can see the point of the ‘affinity of animals’ and you may feel they are a better choice.
Don.
Margaret, follow the link to ‘Belonging’ then the link to ‘Supporters’ and some information/instructions are given there via the ‘Contact Us’ link. If all else fails (!) write to Phil Grubb, Administrator, Affinity, PO Box 246, Bridgend, CF31 9FD. Hope this helps. Don.
Sorry you had trouble finding the right info, Margaret. I have added a link to the “contact us” page on all the belonging pages now, and you can also contact the administrator directly from that page if you wish (via a small form).
We are working towards an online version of the sign-up form which only exists as a paper document at the moment. This should ease the process of signing up and will also allow online payments.
How about having links to news articles or blog posts that people may be interested in. A couple of websites that I think do this well are the Anglican Diocese of Syndey, and the political website ConservativeHome
