Lea este artículo en español: http://mennoniteusa.org/2012/03/12/la-iglesia-menonita-de-ee-uu-lanza-un-nuevo-sitio-en-internet/
By Annette Brill Bergstresser
Home page of Mennonite Church USA's new website
ELKHART, Ind. (Mennonite Church USA)—Mennonite Church USA’s Executive Board staff launched a completely revamped denominational website Feb. 1, coinciding with Mennonite Church USA’s 10th birthday.
“We completely redid the layout of the site to make things easier to find,” says Chris Rahe, web services director for Mennonite Church USA. He notes that the site is now built with WordPress, he says, which makes it easier to maintain and allows people within the organization to update their content directly.
“The technology behind the old site was not working very smoothly,” he says. “We had problems with speed, and maintaining the site was more cumbersome than it should have been.”
Rahe added that because the new site was built using blogging software, it offers more possibilities for two-way communication between users and staff, which Executive Board staff members hope to increase as part of a new online newsletter called On the Way that was launched Feb. 10.
Chris Steingart, a former Mennonite youth pastor, now lead designer for QT Web Designs in Kitchener, Ont., designed the new layout and developed the WordPress templates for the site. Steingart also trained Rahe in the use of WordPress as a content management system. Rahe says he has been very pleased with easy-to-use interface that WordPress provides.
“It works really well, it’s free, and there are many plug-ins available to streamline processes because it’s so widely used,” Rahe says. He adds that Ken Gingerich, art director for Mennonite Church USA, also has contributed to the design of the new site.
Rahe notes that the new site layout means that links to specific pages and documents have changed and that users across the church who have links on their websites or in printed materials that point to locations on the former site will need to update them. Some information—such as archived news stories and back issues of the Equipping resource for pastors and church leaders—has not yet been transferred to the new site.
Users who have questions can contact Rahe at chrisr@mennoniteusa.org.
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Image available:
ftp://ftp.e.mennonites.org/public/NewsPhotos/Website_homepg_2012Feb.jpg
Mennonite Church USA’s new home page.
