A fresh design to the church website has been in development and is almost ready to go live.

The same but different

Over the years since the current design was introduced, church members have provided a lot of positive feedback.

There are others who have turned to the internet and to search engines, when looking for a church to visit in Sittingbourne. The general feedback from those visitors is that they liked the design of the website and found it easy to get the information they were looking for.

That’s why it was seen as important to keep a lot of things the same or similar, to keep things familiar and ‘don’t fix what ain’t broken’. I hope we have achieved this with the new design.

More mobile friendly

We live in a time in which more and more of us are turning to our digital devices, to search and consume information on the Internet. The new design has incorporated a ‘mobile first’ approach, so when you visit the church website using a mobile phone (or even a tablet), the website should adjust according to the size of your device.

With limited time and resources, we may not achieve perfection, but the modern design should adapt much better and to more mobile devices.

Faster

Performance is important in any development process in terms of page loading times. Gone are the days of clicking on a page link, going away, making a cup of tea and finding only half the page has been displayed.

Although things have moved on greatly, we still need to make sure pages load quickly even on mobile devices with limited resources. The new design has been optimised for better performance.

Easier to read

Font styles, sizing and spacing have all been changed to make the information presented on the page, easier to read. No matter what size of screen you are viewing, you should find textual information easier on the eyes.

Features and future tweaks

Many quality-of-life features have been added such as finding posts from previous sermons and a ‘back to top’ button, to help you get around the website quicker. Other tweaks and features will be added as we go forward.

New design launch date

So, you might now be wondering, when will all this digital goodness be made available, when will it go live? It’s hard to say precisely, but hopefully before the end of October. So please keep your eyes open for the fresh new design. I hope you enjoy.

Brian Dickson.