On Ash Wednesday we at Higher Things took down our site in the wee hours of the night and began an update we've been working on for several months now. If you stopped by you saw our joke, "We've given up graphics and fancy websites for Lent". Then, the next night rolled out a total face-lift for the organization's website. Lots of restructuring and a whole lot of house-cleaning produced the new Higher Things website.
I confess, I'm very proud of what's materialized in our redesign. We asked for feedback from the kids who regularly visit the site and together with feedback from our staff we decided to give ourselves a face lift. The last time we had overhauled everything like this was at the end of October in 2005 on Reformation Day. For those that remember, we had out-grown the capacity of our site at that time, literally busting at the seams. This re-design wasn't any different really, we had once more grown beyond the capacity for our current design.
As Higher Things has expanded we added bits and pieces to the site to accommodate. If you think back, in October of 2005 there were no Higher Things Retreats and we hosted only one annual Conference a year. The Reflections had just gone daily for Advent and would not even become truly daily until the end of November with Advent. There also was nothing called myHT, and it was barely even a dream when we announced a secret project called B.A.M.B.I.. Eventually the magazine would become available online and we'd also introduce online registration in the Fall of 2006 for our 2007 conferences, the first year we had two awesome conferences.
The website grew with the organization, by leaps and bounds. As the organization expanded we patched the website here and there to add whatever new thing that Higher Things was doing. Eventually, our website became crowded and too busy for the average web-surfer. We were constantly getting e-mails letting us know that people couldn't find things on our site. So, after the 2007 Conferences we began talking about how we could make the website easier to get around and help people find what they were looking for.
The first thing that we did was clean-house and consolidate, taking our four drop down menus and our ever-expanding black-bar menu and create six distinct categories within the website. These categories are the new drop down menus that you see. The second thing we did was bring the search bar up to the top of the screen and make it a real-time search, hoping that people would not only have an easier time finding it, but also using it. The third thing we did was add the site-map overlay you see when you click on the downward arrows to the far right of our menu, the purpose of which is to give the user a site-wide perspective so that they can find which category they need to navigate to quickly.
These were the name goals of our redesign, but we also added a lot of other features you may or may not have noticed, such as:
- Higher Things user accounts are now more readily accessible at the top of every page's side bar.
- Added related page links in the side bar, along with lower-level pages so that you dont have to scroll to the bottom of every page to continue navigating deeper into the site.
- Made our tags more prominent, moving them up to the top of the side bar and making it easier for the end-user to find related content across the site.
- Added a print-friendly version of the website, which prints off clean content that is more usable.
- Made the site a little wider, because as we looked at our site statistics we realized that our average user was no longer using little 800x600 monitors anymore.
There was one other big change we made that you probably noticed, that was we moved myHT and dropped it's name. myHT started off as a pilot project to get more relevant and time-sensitive content to our youth with a Christian context, centered in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It started off as a wild and crazy idea by Pastor Borghardt, which is why we first called it Borghardt's Audacious Mega-Bodacious Hairy Idea (although you may not the "B" as "Big"). Pastor Borghardt wanted to give youth frequent and regular resources on what's going on around the world and in the Church.
myHT took off slowly and our initial introduction was as an alternative start-page for surfer's coming to the Higher Things website. Eventually things picked up, we posted articles more frequently and people became more interested in the project. All along we had talked amongst ourselves about making myHT, yourHT We didn't want to keep it hidden away in the Higher Things website where people couldn't find it - we wanted it up front wherever everyone could see and use it. So, when we decided to redesign our website we also decided to move myHT to our main page and lose the name. We no longer wanted to distinguish myHT from the rest of our site, because they are intrinsically connected and so myHT became the Higher Things website.
Mixed in with all of our aesthetic and organizational changes were a wide range of begind-the-scenes improvements. These changes are part of the regular work I engage myself in that you don't see. I'm always working to make sure that our website runs smoothly and efficiently, and I'm always trying to make it more intuitive to you, the end-user.
The day after Ash-Wednesday was an exciting day for us as we rolled out the new site. Like I said, I'm very proud of the work that we did and I know that this is the best Higher Things website to date. While our Ash-Wednesday text-only version of our site was a joke, we didn't want to be offensive, and for those that didn't see it - you should take a look at an article that premiered on our front page the day after entitled, "Give it Up for Lent!".
If you have any thoughts or suggestions for the Higher Things website, please feel free to e-mail either myself at, webmaster at higherthings dot org, or Pastor Mark Buetow the Internet Services Executive (and my boss!) at buetowmt at higherthings dot org.
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