Website Progress
Since last October, the OHSCO Team has gone back to the drawing board and basically started from scratch on almost every point on its new website and we are getting close to a roll out of the 1st look of the Homepage.
Since our last report, here’s what we have been up to:
- Listening Posts were established throughout the Twin Cities area asking those with outreach experience and those tech savvy to tell OHSCO what they would like to see on a new website hosted by OHSCO. Participants included ministry leaders, pastors, college students, church workers and college professors. Over 12 pages of ideas were brought forward including suggested websites to benchmark and avoid.
- A core team of OHSCO staff was created and a facilitator was brought in to assist the team in analyzing the responses from the Listening Posts. Two categories surfaced: content versus design. From this foundation, the responses from the listening posts were aligned accordingly.
- Five major areas were identified as content areas: Share the Faith; Outreach Resources; Cross- Cultural Issues; Urban Issues and Rural Outreach. Each area will have a represented picture on the website and when the picture was selected the content of that area will appear.
- Meetings were held among Concordia University management and the IT department to determine resource allocation and to maintain a continuity of design, features and applications within the proposed website.
- A proposed ‘non-working’ home page was presented to OHSCO for initial review during the week of May 18 and forwarded to the trial users and OHSCO staff. OHSCO and IT established a list of items that needed to be maintained with content and these sections were assigned to various members of the OHSCO staff. We expect an initial working website by July 1, 2009. As the site becomes live we will install content from DCO and MACO students, outreach leaders and organizations, connections with organizations that provide resources for outreach and even some book reviews. We envision interviews with the outreach people throughout areas and testimonies from those who have come to Christ.
Stay tuned as we begin our initial roll-out of the new OHSCO website, which we will announce this summer. All OHSCO Partners will be contacted as we unwrap the new website, which could not have been done without you, our faithful partners in His Mission.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Dr. Mark Press (651-641-8830) or Norman Piatti (651-641-8224).