New Web Site Features
Print
We are excited about the new features of the updated Energize web site. Please read about about the main updates below:
Layout
As you can see the design and layout has been vastly updated to both reflect the new Urban Saints branding and improve accessibility to the content and improved functionality. We hope that once you familiarise yourself with it, you will find it adds to your experience of the site and clearer, crisper design makes it easier for you to read. We have also improved the print layout when printing articles or meeting plans;
Navigation
If you hover over some of the main navigation links along the top horizontal bar, you will notice some of them display sub menus. This will help to reduce the number of clicks and provides faster access to key areas.
Where appropriate you will find additional navigation with the right hand column. This is normally related to the page you are viewing.
Group and user area
Once logged in you can gain access to you user account settings and group account (if you are a group administrator).
The user account area enables you to edit your contact details, change your password, manage your course subscriptions, access your saved meeting plans and view details of other leaders in your group.
The group administrator is also able to add and manage leaders, add age groups and assign leaders to age groups and edit group details.
Personalisation
Once logged in certain content is personalised dependent on your settings. For example the news on the home page is displayed for your selected region. If you have selected an alternative language any content in that language is displayed. If you are from a country where we have a partner, additional personalisations relevant to your country/partner are also made.
When viewing meeting plans you will also be able to access your group’s saved meeting plans, see which are tagged as used, etc.
Meeting plans
This area has been completely rebuilt to provide more functionality.
- We have added a search option to search by bible reference.
- Changes you make to a meeting plan are now temporarily stored while you are logged in. So you can go to other parts of the site and return to the meeting plan you were working on and all settings will remain (note if you log out or close your browser these will be reset unless saved – see below)
- You can now save any changes to meeting plans, either as a new meeting plan or by modifying a previously saved one with a record of when it was last saved and by who.
- You can add your own notes and these will be saved too.
- Hiding or showing items in a meeting plan has been made much easier
- Re-ordering items is very easy now with drag and drop functionality that instantly updates the page
- Want to add an item from a different age group’s meeting plan? No problem, this has been added with the ability to preview the item before you insert it. Once inserted you can also move to where you want in the plan.
- Want to download a printable copy of your meeting plan? We have added a great feature that converts your personalised meeting plan into a PDF file that you can save on your computer or print.
- We have even made it much easier to email this PDF to any number of your leaders from within the site.
- If you notice a mistake or want to send us a comment relating to a particular item there is the option to drop us a quick message and alert us through the site.
- There are a few other useful features too, like storing you latest search so you can more quickly access other meeting plans or amend the criteria and clear notes to warn you if you have changed a meeting plan but not saved it.
Search
In addition to some changes to the meeting plan searches we have used the power of google’s search capability to provide a site wide search. This even searches within PDF’s!
Please note this will only search publically accessible content including meeting plan summaries and article summaries. You will still need to login to view restricted content.
Sharing content
We have added some great ways for you to share content with others. You can now post individual pages to your facebook account, digg, delicious and other social networking sites.
We have also added several more RSS feeds so you can subscribe to the latest what’s new from your favourite newsreader or embed content within your blog or web site.
Improved structuring of articles
We have restricted some of the series of articles to provide better consistency and easier navigation.
Partner sites
In the coming months we will be providing various country specific content as we partner with other organisations. This will provide access to more targeted content and will be personalised dependent on the country set in your profile.
Languages
This new site has the capability to be fully multilingual. As we add further translations of content these will become available for you to select. This will then show you the content in the chosen language where available..
Video
With the increase of video over the Internet, we have integrated our own video library into the site with the aim of adding more video content to articles and meeting plans as we produce it. This is an exciting new feature and will enable you to preview videos as well as download for use within meeting plans.
We hope you enjoy exploring the new site. We would welcome any feedback you may have.
