Date: Aug. 13, 2014
Welcome to the new iitubf.org. We've been working to bring you a cleaner and more useful website in the past few months and now is the time to show it off.
Before we get going too far, let's take a look at a brief history of the website.
The Beginning
The website was first set up in 2007, when we started holding worship services in the Godbox. It was very crude looking and featured a location for Flash animation. Unfortunately, there is no surviving proof of what it looked like.
The Enhancement
In 2010, the website received a facelift that brought more color and a new logo to the website. All the underlying code was nearly identical, but the look brought a splash of color to the site.
The Refinement
In the summer of 2012, the website recieved a larger overhaul. The look of the site was smoothed out as the stylized images gave way to cleaner images with less clutter and a more unified look. The homepage received a prominent, new feature image slider to showcase sermons, events and other items. It was during this design that the sermons, which is our most popular area, became readable directly on the site. This has allowed for nearly 2,000 sermon pageviews in the past year alone.
The Overhaul
Now we are in the new site. For 2014, an larger overhaul of the site was in order. All of the code from the previous incarnation was scrapped and the site was rebuilt from the ground up. The 2014 website is by far the cleanest and most unified design of all the websites.
One of the first things you will notice when coming to the site is the massive hero image. It serves as a place to showcase sermon series, events and other items without the need for an image slider. Instead, a hero image is randomly chosen from a pool of existing images. Another great feature that was added is that we now show our most popular sermons for the past month on the homepage and in the right sidebar. You can now see what people are reading and see what all the excitement is about. It is a great way to see what people are interested in.
Another great thing is that we moved the blog out of Wordpress. We've brought it into the fold and it is a full part of the website, like every other page. This allows us to be consistent in our design without having to maintain to content systems.
If you look at the footer of the site, you will notice that there are social media links and contact information, as well as a small form to signup for our weekly newsletter IIT UBF Update.
The Future
Although we launched a new design, this is only Phase 1 of our website redesign. We have a number of enhancements and new features that we will be rolling out over the course of time. We want to give you the ability to filter and sort sermons and blog posts. We want to for you to know what the most popular blog posts are. Also, we want for you to be able to stream any sermon audio, so that you can listen to the sermon while following along with the text all on the website. We will share some updates as they become available.
