By Mike Soika
The Communications Committee, in partnership with a UWM Class and Don Pardee from Ministry and Counsel, has launched into a major overhaul of the MFM website.
You have likely seen a flurry of activity with our redesign team members seeking updated committee information and others asking for or snapping new pictures, all in an effort to bring our website up to date. It is important to understand that the UWM students will only be involved in the website design. All of the content creation and updating is up to us.
While much of the information we currently have on our website will remain (with perhaps some minor tweaks), the site itself will have a new look and feel. We are asking our UWM student team to model our new website design after that of the Annapolis Friends Meeting, which can be seen here. We like the clean look and the simplicity of the Annapolis site.
In mid-July of this year, we called a meeting of the MFM committee conveners in order to gain important insights into what we wanted to see on the website and to learn what is important to us. Here is what we heard:
- The website should reflect who we are as a Quaker community. It should focus on simple (but elegant) ways to convey our message. It should be heavy on pictures of our members and rely less on “too many words”.
- The site should be designed to speak to the needs of newcomers seeking out who we are. But, we will retain the member/attender log-in in order to provide deeper information and to facilitate committee work
- Prominent on our home page will be our location and our hours of service.
- We will have a consolidated section providing guidance and resources for newcomers seeking to know more about us and about Quakerism
- We will consolidate all of our Peace and Justice work into one “landing page” on the site from which a viewer can dig deeper on particular items
- We use an “Infographic” to display our committees from which viewers can click and get more information
- Each committee page will include a brief overview of the work of the committee plus a picture and a personal reflection from the committee convener.
- Committees will have a “Public” face and an “Internal” face. The public face is what is described in the bullet point above. The internal committee page allows us to maintain minutes, financials, historical documents, process documents, etc.
- The Quaker relationship to Christianity is something that should be addressed head on. Perhaps the Annapolis Friends Meeting is a good example of this.
Just creating or updating new content and pictures isn’t all we needed to decide. We also had to walk through some important design considerations such as:
What Name Should We Promote: All at the meeting felt that the name we should promote is: Milwaukee Quakers; just as we have it in our website URL www.milwaukeequakers.org )
Should we have a Logo? Some thought the logo created for our T-shirts is a possibility. See Attached to this article.
What should viewers take away from our website in the first 10 seconds? We are a welcoming and active community where seekers can safely journey with friends on their spiritual deepening
What one thing do we want viewers to DO when visiting our website? To come and sit with us (which coincidentally is the same phrase used by the Annapolis Friends Meeting – but we didn’t know it when we came up with it.)
The idea is that our home page will have a series of pictures of MFM members sitting outside on our bench and then the words:
Come sit with us…….in Silence
In Friendship
In Community
Come work with us…. For Peace and Justice
The June meeting group was asked, what three words best describe our MFM community. There were many suggestions, but most can be summed up with: “Contemplation and Action”
The turnaround on this redesign will be pretty quick. The students began work on September 3rd and need to be done before their semester ends in December. So by January 2020, we hope to have a new look and feel to our website: our public face to the world.