Recommended reading

• ‎The Unitarian Life: Voices from the Past and Present by Stephen Lingwood - a collection of pieces written by various Unitarians through the centuries; gives a good overview of Unitarian thought on many different topics. 
• The Larger View by Vernon Marshall - the history of how Unitarianism became open to other faiths.    
• Unitarian - What's That? by Cliff Reed - another overview, in the form of a Q & A 
• The Unitarians: A Short History by Leonard Smith - gives history of development of Unitarianism (but omits the Earth Spirit strand and most of Transcendentalism)
• Being Together: Unitarians Celebrate Congregational Life - edited by Matthew F. Smith 
• Unitarian Perspectives on Contemporary Social Issues - edited by George Chryssides 
• Unitarian Perspective on Contemporary Religious Thought - edited by George Chryssides
• Elements of Unitarianism by George Chryssides - overview plus potted history. 
• A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism by John A Buehrens and Forrest Church. 
• Love and Death: My Journey through The Valley of the Shadow by Forrest Church 
• The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology by Forrest Church 

You can buy some of these from the UK Unitarian website.

Unitarian Engagement Groups and Small Group Ministry 

Unitarian Engagement Groups - How to start and facilitate groups

Unitarian Christianity 

• David Doel, The Man they called the Christ 
• David Doel, That Glorious Liberty 

Unitarian Earth Spirit 

• Unitarianism and Druidry by Alastair Bate
• Pagan and pantheist tendencies in Unitarianism by Yvonne Aburrow

New church websites

Congratulations to the following churches and chapels who now have shiny new websites.

• Bridport
• Gloucester
• Ross-on-Wye
• Scarborough
• Cheltenham
• Stalybridge
• Cardiff
• Chorley

Shiny new website

Congratulations to Bolton Unitarians on their shiny new website, which has a fresh and modern design. It also has images and videos, a forum, and a news feed.

You can check it out and leave a message in their guest book.

New worship resources page

I've just added a new worship resources page to the blog. If you have suggestions for additions to it, please post them in the comments below.

I have tried not to duplicate UALM's worship resources page too much, so if you expected to find something on the Unitarian Communications page and it's not there, have a look on UALM's page.

New website for Stratford Unitarians

Stratford Unitarians have utilised the website facility created by the DUWIT team and set up a new website for their congregation. The facility is completely free and includes a content management system (CMS) to enable the site to be updated from any computer connected to the internet.

If your congregation, district or society website looks dated or tired, do consider using this facility by contacting Essex Hall or by looking at www.ukunitarians.org.uk.

New UUA website launched

The Unitarian Universalist Association has launched a new website.

It's a new day for UUA.org! Our new home page addresses topics of interest to newcomers to Unitarian Universalism, including a video feature and an interactive banner highlighting our principles and beliefs. A short "Find a Congregation" form makes it easier than ever to look for a local congregation. People already familiar with our faith may want to bookmark the new Resources for UUs page, which features expert-recommended resources, multimedia, and more!

Full Article

The new website works better in larger screen resolutions, and has a more modern look to it, but you can still find your way around if you are more familiar with the old style of the site.

Accessibility

Making your website accessible is very important. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the definitive guide to making your site accessible. There is also a checklist based on the guidelines produced by WebAIM.

Making your site accessible helps everyone, but especially users with visual or hearing impairments, and people with slow web connections.

A useful resource for understanding accessibility issues is Dive into accessibility, which presents a series of things you can do to make your website more accessible, and some case studies of people with disabilities.

There is also a selection of tools you can use to analyse your web pages for accessibility. These make the process very much easier - but they are no substitute for understanding accessibility and learning the basic accessibility guidelines.

Using Plain English

The importance of clear communication is obvious. But plain English is a specific style which can be learnt. The Plain English Campaign have a series of guides to writing plain English.

Some of the key guidelines are:

• avoid passive voice
• avoid long sentences with dependent clauses
• avoid jargon and non-literal phrases
• avoid excessive formality
• Try to expand acronyms (e.g. GA) and explain unfamiliar jargon the first time you use them
• If you are explaining a procedure, try to set it out in small steps in the same order as the person will need to carry out the procedure.
  
• Use numbers not words - it's better to use "23" than "twenty-three" as it stands out more
  

Web statistics

The easiest way to obtain accurate web statistics is to use Google Analytics.

The best place to start is the Get Started page on the Google Analytics site, which explains how to install tracking code and how to view your reports.

Once you have installed Analytics, all you have to do is check back every so often to see which pages are the most popular, and the number of visitors from different parts of the world.

Information architecture

What is information architecture?

1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organising and labelling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability. » More

The information architecture of your website makes it easier for visitors to find information. A typical church website will have times of services, contact details, how to find the church/chapel, sample sermons, profiles of the members and the minister, newsletter articles, and so on.

There are several different models of information architecture.

• All-in-one - all the information on one page
• Flat - all pages are arranged as peers
• Index - like the flat structure, but with a table of contents
• Hub-and-spoke / Daisy - usually used for web applications
• Strict hierarchy - a system where you can only access a lower-level page via its parent
• Multi-dimensional hierarchy - more than one way of browsing to the same content
• Search - for websites with a lot of content

The information architecture is mainly represented by the navigation (menus).

Here are some examples.

• New Unity (Newington Green and Islington Unitarians) has a strict hierarchy model.
• The Bristol Unitarians website has a multi-dimensional hierarchy (you can browse by category or by date). This is mainly due to using a blog with labels to build the site.
• The York Unitarians website has an index structure.

Which of these models you choose for your website depends on how much content you have or plan to add to your website.

When to use PDFs

When not to use PDFs

• If the information is intended to be read online
• If another content type could be used instead, i.e. a normal HTML web-page

When to use PDFs

• When a document needs to be downloaded, read offline or printed
• If a document is more than 5 pages long. But consider whether it could be broken down into smaller sections and presented as HTML
• When attaching a document to an email
• As an additional alternative to online content - e.g. this set of tutorials could also be provided as a single PDF document
• When formatting needs to be preserved - e.g. a PowerPoint presentation
• Instead of Microsoft Office documents. But HTML is better most of the time
• See the definitive list of when to use PDFs by Joe Clark

What else to include with your PDF document

• An online HTML version or summary of the document
• A link to download Adobe Acrobat Reader
• A PDF icon to indicate that it is a PDF document (see an example on the BBC website)

See also

• Microsoft Office and PDF Document Guidelines
• Avoid PDF for on-screen reading (Jakob Nielsen)
• Facts and opinions about PDF accessibility (Joe Clark)

Cool tools

For people who want to bring together different services to create a unique blend (also known as a mashup), there are some really useful and easy to use tools out there.

Widgetbox allows you to develop small applications for embedding in webpages. The easiest widget to set up is the blidget, which fetches an RSS feed (from a blog, news service such as the BBC or the University's News pages,del.icio.us tags, Yahoo! Pipe or Flickr) and creates a shiny widget for embedding in a web-page, or for turning into a Facebook application or Google gadget.

Yahoo! Pipes allow you to bring together (aggregate) several different RSS feeds, filter out duplicate items, add author information, and so on.

Flickr is an online photo storage site, where you can display your photos (either publicly or so that only friends and family can see them), and you can use advanced search to obtain photos for use in presentations and on websites under the Creative Commons licence.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, which means it is like bookmarking a favourite page in your web browser, but the bookmarks are saved on the del.icio.us website, and tagged with labels to make them easier for you and others to find. Each page on del.icio.us (whether it's popular tags, all tags, your bookmarks, or one of your tags) has an RSS feed associated with it, which can then be imported to a blidget or an RSS reader.

Jotform is the first web based WYSIWYG form builder. Its intuitive drag and drop user interface makes form building a breeze. Using JotForm, you can create forms, integrate them to your site and collect submissions from your visitors.

Google Scholar provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles. You still need an Athens account to log in to many of the resources you can find via Google Scholar, but it searches across all of JSTOR, Ebscohost, Blackwell Synergy, the DNB, Google Books, etc.

Google Books - Google have digitised many books libraries around the world. If the book is out of copyright, you can download the entire book, and search all of its content. Books that are still in copyright only allow a limited search. » More information

These are just two of the many tools offered by Google.

Unitarian websites

There are many Unitarian websites at national, regional and local levels. Here's how to find your way around them.

National level
The General Assembly website has recently been re-launched. It has resources for congregations and explains Unitarianism for inquirers. The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches is the body in which all Unitarians unite.

Unitarians in the UK & Ireland is a resource about and for Unitarians. It also offers a free website template for Unitarian communities that don't currently have one. It explains what Unitarianism is and how to find Unitarians.

There are several Unitarian societies covering special interests such as music, earth spirituality, history, meditation, peace, all of which have their own website.

There are various commissions, including the Engagement Groups Support Panel, which encourages the development of engagement groups.

Regional level
Most districts have their own website.

Local level
Most churches have their own websites, and you can find these using either the congregation finder on the General Assembly website, or the map of congregations on the Unitarians in UK & Ireland website.