New-Website-News Post #4
The new Temple Beth El website was approved to be moved to our official longstanding domain at the September meeting of your Board of Directors. The two websites had been linked together through a homepage button on the old website which brought you to the new website. Now the new website has been moved to our permanent bethelsp.org domain and the old website has gone away silently into the internet night.
A screenshot will not quite do justice to the lively grace of our new website’s home page slideshow. The new website is quite different from the previous Temple Beth El website. It is modern and has a clean design. It is simple and colorful. It has pictures. It is responsive, in that it looks just as good, or better, on your phone as on your computer.
On the home page, the first thing you see is a full screen image of our beautiful stained-glass windows. This image stays for a while and then fades into other images, ones that show pictures of our clergy and congregation, interspersed with scenes of Jewish life and our newly remodeled building. Then, as one scrolls down the page, you have various items that you would expect to find on a homepage – an introduction to who we are and what we feel we stand for, a few more photos that you can click on to see a full screen version, a selection of upcoming events from our calendar, a series of announcements, and a “slider” showcasing our clergy with snippets from their biographies. Following this, there is information from the Union of Reform Judaism with a button that will take you to their podcasts. Finally, at the bottom of the page is a “footer” which has again our social media links, the URJ logo, a back-to-the-top button, several essential menu links, and once more, our contact information.
It has easy navigation. The new navigation system is simple yet multifaceted. The main navigation menu is at the very top and stays there as you move down the page. The menu names are mostly simple action words: Explore-Connect-Calendar-Pray-Worship-Learn-Give-Act. Once you click on these, you are on an introductory page for that menu action word, which has a layout of submenu items available to click on, either from the menu bar, or from the page image itself. Finally, there are what are called, very descriptively, “breadcrumbs,” Hansel and Gretel fashion, so that one can find one’s way back to parent pages in the menu.
The pages that you will find under the menu action words are items like announcements, news of events and programs, articles from the bulletin and elsewhere, weekly Parshas, and much more. Also, a good deal of the content is organized by category as well as by date. Categories include announcements, our Cantor’s column, our clergy transition, our congregation, our Educator, our leadership, news, Parshas, our Rabbi’s review, Religious Action @TBE, Sisterhood, special events, Torah School, updates, website, worship, and our youth groups. This is located to the right side on many website pages and there are a variety of ways of finding what you might be interested in.
To reiterate about using the new website on small devices, on your smartphone or tablet, depending on the size of the screen and the orientation, if there is not enough room to display the menu bar, it is replaced with a slide-out menu that appears when needed. How does one get to that menu? It’s called a “hamburger,” which is a symbol consisting of 3 horizontal lines stacked one upon another, hence the name. When you touch it, the full menu will come onto your screen from the right.
It was the work of your website committee over several meetings and key decisions which helped bring our new website for Temple Beth El to fruition. Have a look around and enjoy! Should you have any comments or suggestions, please contact one of your website committee members.