On Monday, June 5th the Episcopal Café will not be available while we work on our new site design. The site will be down for the week, but our Facebook and Twitter accounts will be active so be sure to check us out there. And then come and check out the new and improved Café 3.0. Also, if you get the chance, please consider a donation to help us to continue to improve news coverage and storytelling.
In 2014, the Café moved to its current site layout. At that time, we had few (as in none) resources and we had a short window of time to move the site to a new host which also necessitated using a new content management system. The move itself was necessary because the church entity which had hosted the site wanted its server space back.
A couple of key goals of that iteration of the Café was to be able to present all of our various content streams to all our readers, to allow greater use of images, and to make management of comments easier. Our current design accomplished all of those goals and in that time we’ve seen a near doubling of daily visitors.
It became clear though, that one aspect that was lost was that it was more difficult to find content, especially for readers who aren’t able to check in every day. This time around, thanks to the generous support of so many, we’ve had the resources to work with a professional designer (QuanbeckCreative) with a background in the Church.
We think you’re going to like our new site a lot. Each of our content areas (News, Features, Podcasts and Speaking to the Soul) will have a home on the front page along with a selection of the recent posts from each of those. We’ll also be adding the ability to sign up to have the kind of stories you want to see delivered regularly by email. And we’re adding a much easier to use and more prominent search feature. In our comments section, we’re enhancing the opportunity for participation by adding the means to vote comments up or down.