This site is under construction

A word from the web developer

Welcome to the new site for New Hope Anglican.

Things here are still very much "under construction."  You may see pictures in places that don't belong, or don't seem representative - you may find texts that don't seem quite right.  In the last few days, unfortunately, there were also some items here on the site that I'm afraid were somewhat misleading.

When a new site is being built, it's the usual practice to fill it with "placeholder" texts - texts which aren't yet the "real" texts, but are just there to make sure that the site function and layout are working as intended.  Sometimes, when there's enough time to build a site, this all goes on at a different web address, so the public never sees it.  In our case, however, the church needed a new site A.S.A.P, so - the site went up at its "live" web address.

The pictures you see will need to change.  The texts will need to change, and maybe even the whole organizational structure, as your church thinks about what best fits its needs.  I only know a few details about your church, and was sent a few hundred photos from which to choose - so I just picked a few pictures which I hoped would be representative for your church.  You will need to choose pictures yourselves, to find the best way to reach out to people with your site and let them know what New Hope Anglican is about.  This can be time-consuming, but can also be quite exciting.

E.g., I know that we need a page for "womens' ministry."  But I don't have any pictures from events for your womens' ministry.  But I have some women in a picture from your Shrove Tuesday pancake event, so I use that picture for your womens' ministry page - but I don't know who these women are, maybe they aren't even active in your womens' ministry?  You will need to figure out what picture goes best here, and I hope that gradually we can also find someone from your womens' ministry to post information about your events, your educational materials, your reflections on what you are doing - and your pictures! - so Father Bryan is free to keep his mind on tending to the leaders in your church, and helping enable them in ministry.

There were also some "events" posted which weren't "real" events - but we also needed to have some "placeholder" events in order to make sure that the date functions, and event listings were working properly.  My apologies to any of you who may have thought that these were "real" events - in most cases, if you clicked to the page in question, it was obvious that the event was just a placeholder, since the body was entirely in Latin (what web designers usually use for "placeholder" text, so people don't confuse the placeholder text with "real" text) - but in other cases, we tried to provide information on dates, but that information wasn't correct.  My apologies again if there was confusion or lost time because of this.

Fortunately, this site is being built in a way that this can be avoided in the future.  Churches like New Hope are growing fast, and their sites need to grow along with them.  It's important that the program running the site is able to keep up with the needs of a growing church.  This has been one of our highest priorities in programming the code that runs this site.  It may be more difficult at the beginning to get everything just right, but I hope that you find in the upcoming months and years that you've been provided with a site that meets your needs, with content that's easy to update, by anyone who is involved in ministry at your church and needs to post an event, a reflection, or a photograph, and keep everyone informed with up-to-date information about what's going on at your church.