Mark, building the site from the LHS is pretty standard because we can’t control what resolution people set their screens on. If it helps, we have a 24-inch over here with even more space, but it’s a balancing act for a whole range of users. Sydneyanglicans may have more degrees than the average Australian but they seem to hold on to some of the most antiquated hardware - and no, that wasn’t a reference to the 1662 BCP ;o)
Simon, that’s a good option for the next update of the forums, which due to their complexity, we handle somewhat separately of the rest of the site. However we will be working on them in the new year so I’ll take it on board.
Luke - too modest. I’ll add it to your growing list of endearments, heh.
And to continue from my second post about a calendar of events, you could add an option where the users could post christian events on this site. That might certainly increase the attractiveness and usability of this site. That way it would increasingly be about a community of Sydney Anglicans interacting rather than hearing what Sydney Anglican management has to say. Not that there is anything wrong with that as you guys are doing a great job, I just think there could be more say from the audience of this site.
Yes, we actually ran an event calendar for the first two years but hardly anyone took it up. What little attention it did start to get, though, was from advertisers who began to see it as a way of posting without paying if you understand. The resulting confusion led to its discontinuation two versions back.
I’ll admit that we’re a bit unsure how to continue on this front, being a site that covers an increasing amount of its running costs from advertising. We have, however, encouraged people to keep discussing those events that they’re taking part in on our forums (short of outright, no-discussion advertising, which is of course contra to our positing policy) and hope that this continues to build the sense of community we have at Your.sydang.
Hope that clarifies where we are currently - or at least how we got here.
Mark, building the site from the LHS is pretty standard because we can’t control what resolution people set their screens on. If it helps, we have a 24-inch over here with even more space, but it’s a balancing act for a whole range of users. Sydneyanglicans may have more degrees than the average Australian but they seem to hold on to some of the most antiquated hardware - and no, that wasn’t a reference to the 1662 BCP ;o)
Apart from this website, most websites I look at are centred (e.g. SMH). Even we at SMBC will have a website in 2008 that is centred. So these people you’re referring to mustn’t do much surfing.
No worries it was worth a short anyway! Sounds like the church leaders could organise events and SydAngs website could help facilitate these events. Perhaps every three months each region of Sydney Anglican churches (e.g. North Shore, West, Hills) could organise a social event for people from churches in that region to attend. The details could be posted on this site. Having social events like these would mean we would have the benefit of multiple small churches, but still have some benefit of a large church in meeting new people all the time. But it seems its really up to church leaders in each region to agree to such a thing first and initiate the action, and then this site could respond and help spread the word.
So events could be posted by appointed leaders in each region rather than relying on someone random to do it.
Anywho they are my thoughts but there seems to be alot more to it rather than simply opening up a calendar of events - it would require cooperation and commitment from outside this site.
Without entering into a tit-for-tat list of web sites, or the ‘battle of the preferences’ when it comes to setting up your browser, you’ll be happy to know that your suggestion has at least made it to the list of those being considered for the April update.
Simon, you have summarised the case very neatly. It will take more than our creation of new resources to have people use them. I’m afraid in this case we learnt that Hollywood lied: We built it, but they did not come.
However things may change. A simple way to guage this might be to start a thread in the ‘General discussion’ forum called ‘Upcoming events’. If it gets lots of attention then we could consider a service that would make its content more accessible.
This page does not look correct on my 17” Philips monitor in IE7. The text does nto flow properly and I’m missing half of the stuff on the right that has disappeared. It looks like Rick Warren is the senior pastor of All Souls’. ..
Looks fine in Firefox, but.
Thanks I’ll add that feed! I’m not sure if the following comments are your responsibility, so the next comments might be for the webmaster.
I noticed that for one forum feed (i.e. http://your.sydneyanglicans.net/forums/rss/) the URLs were hyperlinked (with the blue underline) but they were not in another feed (i.e. http://your.sydneyanglicans.net/feeds/forum_latest)?
The front page of your.sydneyanglicans.net has quite a few RSS feed button links which is very useful, perhaps another RSS feed button could be added to latest forum posts? Without Andrew’s help there I personally would have found it very difficult to find the list of RSS feeds available for the forums. Perhaps something could be done to increase ease of navigation in this area.
I was surprised that Google Reader was not suggested as a good RSS reader on http://your.sydneyanglicans.net/services/rss/. It is fairly new so perhaps this page hasn’t been updated since then, or the webmaster has a good reason for not including it!
I realise there is a code for inserting hyperlinks on these posts, but personally I find it frustrating to look up this code everytime. Alot of online software like Yahoo! email and blog systems don’t require code, it is simply a case of highlight the text and click the hyperlink button to insert the URL. Along with auto-hyperlinking, can this be done for bold, italics etc for posting?
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