The Friend launches new website
Jez Smith unwraps our new website
‘The new website looks really good. I like the clear layout and the “white space” feels “quakerly” as if it’s holding the material in the light.’ ‘It does look good!’ It is this kind of feedback that makes us feel like we’re heading in the right direction with our new website, which has come about thanks to your kind donations as part of our appeal earlier this year.
Our intention was to create a site that embraced Quaker values. After some thought, we decided to focus on the concept of simplicity. We interpreted this as needing space around the text, but without that space swallowing the text.
The website is the place where some of our subscribers come to pick up their copy of the Friend each week. Others will drop by if their copy hasn’t arrived in the post on time.
We’re using big bold images to introduce a few articles on our homepage each week and then you can access the edition by clicking on ‘magazine’ in the top menu. You can also choose from other options such as ‘news’ or ‘culture’ if you just want to see those types of articles.
Thanks to one of our new features, some articles will be free to view and can be easily shared with others. Just as readers of the paper copy of the Friend might cut out an article and put it on the Meeting house noticeboard, now you can email, tweet, post on Facebook or choose one of over thirty other networking site options to share the article. Just look for the ‘Free’ marker at the beginning of the article.
With the ‘most viewed’ and ‘most commented’ tables you can see which articles have attracted the most interest and the tables change depending on which part of the site you are logged into.
As the site develops, we will be adding old editions of the Friend online, with pdfs available to subscribers and more individual articles becoming available for free, so that we can share both the best of what Quakers can offer to newcomers and to all Friends wherever they are.
If you subscribe to the paper edition and have previously had online access please email jez@thefriend.org to have your details updated on the new site.
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