Finally moved the menu beneath the page heading

After months of experimenting with different looks and different coding methods, I finally changed the page layout to make the navigation menu a horizontal bar between the page heading and the page content. I quite like this look, although I want to clean up some of the coding behind the scenes. There was a bit of scare just before I updated the web site when I found that Internet Explorer 7 did not separate the menu items at all, unlike Firefox, which I used for my own testing. I still have not seen this layout on Internet Explorer 6, so I just have to hope it looks all right. Maybe I can check that at the weekend or on Monday.

One major benefit of moving the menu is all the extra space that became free on the left hand side of each page. I have turned that area into a "side bar" and posted various brief notices in it. I am not yet convinced about the look of the sidebar, but functionally I think it helps. At least it let me follow Ollie's suggestion to highlight the Sunday morning service time.

The other major change is that Pastor Bruce now has his sermons on a blog, to allow (encourage!) people to post comments. All I have done on the church web site is to provide a link to the blog (and explain that the blog is actually on a different site).

I do hope this helps start moving the church web site into becoming a channel for interaction, not just a one way flow of information.

All pages updated to new layout

Today I finally updated all of the original pages on the Knox web site to use a single, new page layout. There are still many improvements needed, but I feel that this was a big step, since it eliminates any difference between the new pages (the "Events" pages) and the old/original pages. Now all of them use the same stylesheet to describe the layout, so when I change the stylesheet, all of the pages will change consistently.

Now that everything is in sync, I would like to get some feedback from the people who use the site, to find out if they see any problems with the new layout.

These are the changes I would like to make in future.

• Switch the menu to be horizontal, between the heading and the content.


• Add new content into the left column, once the menu is moved. For example, the events page could list the months in this column, so people can go directly to the month of interest. Similarly for the sermons.


• Refresh the content of the current pages.


• Add some images to show the location and the people.


• Add descriptions of the groups and activities that make up the church. The events pages give very little detail and they are organized by date, not by the group involved.


• Perhaps add a simple search option for the site. Of course Google would do this already, so it would just be a cosmetic/convenience change.

The main change I would like to make is to have provide an interface so that other people can update the content on the site without knowing much/anything about HTML. My current thought on this is that it would need major enhancements to the back-end. (Currently there is no "back-end" at all. It's plain HTML!) PHP/MySQL seems the simplest development route to take, but perhaps there is something even simpler?