Website update

I spent a bit of this afternoon updating the church website. I really only went in to add today's homily (honestly!), but once in, well, I couldn't stop. It didn't hurt that although it was sunny and warm outside there were also breezes absolutely loaded with allergens. A good day to stay inside!

Once the homily was added I decided to update a couple of items on the Announcements page.

And then, looking at the main page, I decided to take on a task I've wanted to do for a long time, a change to the "Fr. McGrath on the 1940 Hymnal" box in the upper right corner. When the first of his articles appeared in The Mandate, January 2006, I was under the impression this was a six-part series, spread out over the year. I enjoyed those articles and since there would be only six I created a box (okay, "table cell") to provide links to them.

Well, it turned out there were more than six, so the list just kept growing and the web page began to get a bit "unbalanced," especially after I'd added links to the three church-related blogs.

I'd changed from "Part 1: Jan/Feb 2006: to using article titles in 2007, and finally changed the first year's links to titles. What a mess that made; they'd wrap to the next line making the box even longer. So, I already had them listed on the Archives page; I left only this year's articles, changed the numbering to titles on the Archive page, and created a link to the Archive page list.

No sooner had I done all this and uploaded the pages and documents to the website, but an e-mail from Fr. Daniel comes in with more material for the Announcements page. It appears he was checking up on the page while I was uploading! So it was back to revising the Announcements page, and then a few more minor tweaks to the main page, and... I'm done.

Almost.

I am restraining myself.

Really.

When we were talking about a new sign for the church last year, there were discussions of a symbol to put on the sign. The St. Bartholomew's Shield prominent on the website (and our letterhead, and other places) might not present as well to the community due to its three flensing knives. We finally settled on a variant (there are LOTS of variants) of the Canterbury Cross, I drew up a scalable image on the computer, and came up with a color scheme I liked that would sit on a blue background, the color of the background of our current sign. (I hope the new sign, when it's made, will use that color.)

I'd love to change the website over to that scheme and use that graphic, but there were too many design decisions in the current scheme that would have to be reversed.

Hmmm... maybe if I just change the colors...