Welcoming Websites now has a Facebook page! The page is another venue for us to share news, photos, and videos, and for fans to post questions and comments about web development for congregations and religious nonprofits.

Welcoming Websites is excited to announce the first, experimental release of Welcoming Websites Wizard, a content management system for Unitarian Universalist churches. The Wizard is a distribution of the popular Drupal content management system, and the software will soon be released under the GNU General Public License as a Drupal installation profile. The Wizard includes a number of features useful to church staff and volunteers, including:

• Rich text editing and image uploads
• An events calendar
• Sermon and newsletter archives
• Minister and staff pages
• Special pages for each religious education class, committee, and church group
• An easy-to-use interface for adding new pages to the site map
• Nearly two dozen pre-installed graphical templates

All of these features are available on top of the world-class content management features available in the core Drupal platform, including flexible data types and categorization systems; a powerful user management and permission system; and an extensible system for adding new functionality and designs to the system. While the Wizard gives a church a powerful platform to build a new website, it is also easy for churches to change and extend the underlying system, to meet their unique requirements. The Wizard is available for download at http://www.welcomingwebsites.com/files/uuwebsite.tar.gz. It is available free of charge. However, the Wizard is still in experimental stage; this release is meant for testing and demonstration purposes, and should not be used as the foundation for a live website. Several known bugs exist, and we will be working to correct these issues in the near future. We plan to offer fixed-price packages for installation, support, and maintenance in the coming months.

Interested users may also try a demonstration of the Wizard, available at http://demo.welcomingwebsites.com.

The release of the Wizard marks an important milestone for Welcoming Websites. We hope that this new software package will help Unitarian Universalist churches build new, engaging websites easily and quickly. We believe that the web is a powerful platform for expanding the nurturing and compassionate ministry of Unitarian Universalist platforms, and that the Wizard is an important tool for bringing churches online.

Welcoming Websites is creating a software package for congregations seeking an attractive, functional church website at a low cost. The package, which we're calling "UU Drupal," will include the core Drupal system with added functionality such as calendars, audio sermon archives, newsletter archives, and a blog. At least five free design themes will be included, so your congregations can select the look that best reflects its personality. The administrative interface will be user-friendly, allowing your website administrators to update the website with ease. Drupal is open-source software and we can install "UU Drupal" on your hosting environment, giving you complete access to the site and its underlying code. A "UU Drupal" site will be extensible, meaning that additional functionality can be added over time. We look forward to providing this new service to congregations in 2009.

Note: Since the original publication of this post, we have renamed our product Welcoming Websites Wizard.

Today the Unitarian Universalist Association released People of Faith, Standing on the Side of Love, a slideshow celebrating the commitment of Unitarian Universalists to marriage equality. Welcoming Websites arranged the video, which juxtaposes photographs contributed by Unitarian Universalists throughout the country against the background music of "Standing on the Side of Love," written by Jason Shelton and sung by Jeannie Gagné.

We are very excited about the release of this video. With 1,100 views on YouTube already, we are confident that the video will help the UUA promote its message of equality and love.

The Unitarian Universalist Statewide Advocacy Networks mobilize Unitarian Universalists to advance social justice. The following eleven states have networks: California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Washington. A twelfth network is forming in Missouri. The statewide networks are sponsored in part by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

Welcoming Websites has created a website for the UU Statewide Advocacy Networks to facilitate communication among network leaders and to share information with the general public.

The website includes content for the general public and a members-only section. The public portion of the site offers advice and sample documents for visitors who may be interested in starting a statewide network. Network leaders are able to post sample documents to the website and to designate whether these documents are for the publicly-accessible section or for the members-only section. The members-only section also includes a group blog to which leaders can post.

Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America, edited by Frederick Clarkson, will be available October 1st (or you can pre-order now)!

The anthology includes "Using New Media to Strengthen the Religious Left," which Shai and I wrote to give religious progressives nuts-and-bolts advice on building a new media strategy. We walk readers through the various types of new media (such as blogs, social networking, and social bookmarking), give examples of specific tools within each type, and offer a prescription for a balanced and manageable new media strategy. In crafting this essay, we drew on our experience providing web development to religious clients through Welcoming Websites, and on other personal and professional experiences using new media.

For updates on events and online conversations related to "Dispatches From the Religious Left" please visit Clarkson's website.

I am pleased to announce that in June, I accepted a permanent position at the Unitarian Universalist Association with nearly-full-time hours. My position is public witness specialist and I help publicize the public witness initiatives of the UUA and member congregations. During the spring I had been working at the UUA on a part-time basis; I decided to step up my commitment because this is a wonderful opportunity to raise the public profile of Unitarian Universalism and share the good news about our congregations. The desire to help share our faith led me to co-found Welcoming Websites with Shai, and that desire that will continue to fuel my work at the UUA, as well as our work here at Welcoming Websites.

The decision carries for me a little sadness that I will be spending less time each week at Welcoming Websites. However, Shai will continue to be fully available to new and ongoing UU clients, and we will continue to offer the same level of web development services. Welcoming Websites has had several accomplishments that we are proud of this spring, including the launch of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee website, the redesign of Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt's blogs, and a good start to the redevelopment of the Prairie Star District's Stonetree Congregational Resources Project website.

For those of you who know me also through the UUA, or through Looking for Faith, you may notice that I am wearing many hats. (Sorry to use such a cliche, but there's just no other phrase for it!) We want to be very clear that Welcoming Websites continues to be an independent business; we are not sponsored, endorsed, or otherwise supported by the Unitarian Universalist Association.

If you have any questions about how Welcoming Websites operates, or suggestions for how we can better serve congregations and religious nonprofits, please don't hesitate to contact us.

As the 2008 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly begins, Welcoming Websites is proud to announce the launch of the new website for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.  The new website reorganizes UUSC's content around four high-level navigation menus, and allows visitors to learn a great deal about UUSC's four focus areas, its membership engagement activities, and its wide range of human rights advocacy resources.  The launch of the new website coincides with the launch of UUSC's e-Community, an online community which facilitates email newsletter signups, online donations, and e-activism.

Welcoming Websites took an active role in planning and implementing the new UUSC website.  The project began with a brief strategy phase, which focused the site's goals and core audiences.  An initial version of the site was implemented using Drupal 5.x, combining a variety of standard modules including CCK, Views, and eCommerce.  A look-and-feel incorporating the new UUSC logo was drafted by JM Design, and converted into a Drupal theme with close cooperation between JM Design and Welcoming Websites.  Welcoming Websites devised a number of custom modules and theme modifications to complete the project.

A great deal of the content on UUSC's website is related to major initiatives or membership engagement activities.  This content is organized into a small number of "minisites".  Each minisite corresponds to a single UUSC focus area, campaign, or membership engagement activity.  Minisites conform to a standard structure, allowing visitors to navigate through the site easily, knowing that they can expect a consistent experience from one page to the next.  At the same time, administrators have the freedom to tweak and refine this structure, to emphasize information that is specific to a small number of initiatives.

The use of Drupal for the UUSC's website significantly reduces the overhead involved in managing content, which facilitating unique functionality and content organization, through minisites and other core Drupal functionality.  Welcoming Websites is excited to support the important human rights advocacy work carried on by UUSC and its members through the creation of a solid platform for online communications.

Welcoming Websites is pleased to be working with the Stonetree Congregational Resources project. The Stonetree website, supported by the Prairie Star District of the Unitarian Universalist Association, connects Unitarian Universalist congregations with people who can serve as resources on the arts, ceremonies, social action, and other areas related to congregational life. Welcoming Websites is assisting the Prairie Star District in using Drupal to make the Stonetree Congregational Resources website more scalable, and accessible to a larger audience.

Welcoming Websites has been working with Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt to develop a more unified look among her two established blogs (RevRose.com and TrusteeTalk.net) and her new blog (NoHomeTraining.org).

As part of this process, we migrated Trustee Talk into Wordpress and installed Wordpress for No Home Training. (Rev Rose was already in Wordpress). With all three blogs then using Wordpress, we produced three different variations of the Hemingway Wordpress theme and installed one on each of McNatt's blogs. The structural similarity between all three variations of Hemingway creates continuity between the three blog, while the unique color schemes allow each blog to have its own personality.

Trustee Talk

Rev Rose

No Home Training