Welcome to our New Website - 29 January 2019

Our new church website went live on Tuesday 29th January 2019. We have been working on our new website behind the scenes since mid-October and so it is a great relief to see it finally launched.

It is hosted by ChurchInsight.com who look after over 600 church websites and are based near Cambridge and are able to provide us with the level of support that we need.

Whilst many were happy with our last website, which has been in use for the past 2 years, there were some problems with it and we were not able to get much support from our web developers.

Regular users of our website might have taken a few minutes to find their way around the new site and to get used to it, but we particularly hope that newcomers will be able to find what they need more easily and have incorporated some new features to assist them with this, including a page specifically for those new to the church.

We hope that you will also appreciate some of the other new features, such as the calendar, which might look similar, but which automatically lists relevant events on various pages to make it easier to find out what is going on.  So if you look at the Sunday Services page you will see a list of services for next Sunday, or check out the Women’s Groups or Men’s Activities or Children and Young People pages and you will see their forthcoming events listed on their pages and so on.  And there is potential to develop the calendar further.

Regular users will still be able to access the latest Grapevine online on the Friday before its publication on the Sunday and the sermons at our 10am services can also be easily found - good if you have missed a service or would like to listen again.

Often there is more than one way to reach the page you want. For example Latest News can be accessed from the What's On menu bar at the top or from one of the boxes at the bottom of the homepage or via the orange Latest News bar in the right hand menu bar on the content pages. And there is also a search bar - top right.- which seems to work quite well.

As more people are accessing the site from their tablets and smart phones we have made sure that it works well on these devices.

We have some beautiful stained glass windows and I have tried to make greater use of these in our new website. There is still more work to be done on the new website and I plan to add more photographs.

The comments from users to date have been favourable but if you have a problem finding your way around the website or have suggestions for improvement, or spot something that needs updating, I would love to hear from you.  In particular we can easily change the 8 boxes at the bottom of the home page to link to different parts of the website. Catch me after one of our services or email me at website@stmaryssaffronwalden.org, bearing in mind that there are some parts of the template that we can't easily change.

Thank you to those who have already fed in suggestions following the preview and especially to Charles Cowper who has been a great help.

For those who are technically minded, it is not a WordPress site, but is web based and now has extra security as it is https and not http! The name  www.stmaryssaffronwalden.org is the same but the full address is now https://www.stmaryssaffronwalden.org  (https and not http at the start)

Martin Hugall