ELCA Web Site Unveils New Look

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- The Web site of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) -- http://www.elca.org -- began 2002 with a new look. The redesign was guided by the results of an online survey conducted January through May 2001, said Rex Paisley, Web manager, ELCA Department for Communication.
The December 2001 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine called the ELCA Web site "perhaps the most thorough Protestant Web site on the Web, with church history, time lines and LutherLink online discussions."
"A goal of the redesign was to build a more effective bridge from the users to the content they seek," said Paisley. "We're presenting the information in a more topic-driven format, to help browsers get to the information more intuitively," he said.
"The Web site should still feel familiar to our regular users. Some format, content and features have remained consistent," said Paisley.
Of the 859 people who participated in the survey, about 92 percent were ELCA members. About half were between the ages of 45 and 64. About a quarter of the participants were pastors. About 85 percent had visited the site before.
Forty-three percent of the participants had visited the ELCA Web site to find a particular resource, 33 percent to find news or information about the ELCA, 30 percent to find specific information, 17 percent while surfing the Internet and 11 percent to learn more about the ELCA in general.
"One of the biggest things we learned from the survey is that our search feature is underutilized," said Paisley. The new design makes it more visible, he said.
"Weekly features" are now labeled, so new users recognize them as regularly changing content, said Paisley.
The church should be seen as "a welcoming place and a place of faith," so a "welcome center" and a "spiritual center" were added to the site, said Paisley. People new to the site or new to Lutheranism will find the information they seek in centralized places, he said.
The ELCA home page now features a button labeled "Iglesia Evangelica Luterana en America" (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). Paisley said, "There was a conscious effort to draw attention to the resources the church has developed in Spanish."
"Quick links" make it easier to find some of the site's more popular features, said Paisley, like the ability to locate the nearest ELCA congregations. "Hot topics" includes a "Top 10" list of the site's pages with the most visits the previous month.
Many of the quick links are to places on the Web site that "support connectivity across all the expressions of the church" -- online LutherLink discussions, directories and other ways to be involved, said Paisley. "They really show the site's priorities," he said.
The number of "selected topics" on a pull-down menu was reduced, said Paisley. "Too many hinder the site's functionality," he said. "Forms" is a popular topic for congregational and synod leaders these days, Paisley pointed out, as many are dealing with year-end reports.
"A good thing about the Web is that it is always changing," said Paisley. The ELCA Web site can adapt almost immediately to better serve its visitors, he said.
As video and audio capabilities improve and more users become familiar with them, the ELCA Web site will grow along with that potential, said Paisley. Such features as live reports from ELCA churchwide assemblies every other year constantly raise the expectations of the site's users, he said.
The ELCA Web site gets about one million page views per month, said Paisley. That's about twice as many as last year at this time. The site consists of more than 10,000 pages, he said, and that's about twice as many as last year at this time, too.

For information contact:
John Brooks, Director (773) 380-2958 or NEWS@ELCA.ORG
http://listserv.elca.org/archives/elcanews.html