The current version of the Newlife Uniting Church website was designed, developed and implemented by designer Matt McNamee and launched in August 2009. The main focus of this version of the site was to focus on usability, implementing a content management system, standards compliance, providing addon resources and search engine optimization.

The tools we used

Newlifeuniting.com is powered by WordPress, a powerful PHP 5 content management system which provides it all. We’re hosted on unlimitedspace.com.au and have domain names provided by Bara’ Domains. The team used these tools to bring you this site:

• Apple Computers (for everything)
• Adobe Photoshop CS5 (design)
• Dreamweaver (coding, development and ftp)
• Safari (Website testing and debugging)
• VMware Fusion (cross-browser testing)

Tech Bits

While remaining relevant in our culture, we’ve used the newest technologies to enhance our website:

• Javascript
  • Jquery framework (Cycle slider, prettyPhoto, SF dropdown menu)
  • Integrated Bara’ Mail sign up
• PHP (the whole site)
• Html/ Css
• MySQL (databases)
• cPanel (managing our web hosting very simply)

Services

In conjunction with our website, we use some other web services:

• Vimeo (hosting video)
• Facebook and Twitter (social networking)
• Bara’ Mail (email newsletters)
• my.Newlife – supplied by Elvanto (a portal for rostering and sharing files)
• ES Simple Uploader (for uploading files remotely – such as large photos members want to share)

We hope you enjoy the site. We recommend you view it with Safari or Firefox – and not Internet Explorer.