We're very pleased to welcome you to our new Salt & Light European website. We've been thinking about moving the site for a year or two now, and after exploring a number of options and a couple of false starts we've ended up setting ourselves a fairly short development schedule. Typical! However, we wanted the new site to be live in time for the build up to 28:18 Springboard, so we're going live on Sunday 14 September 2008. (It's only a Beta version though, so do let know about any issues you find.)

• We had at least 1500 pages, images and downloads on the old site, so we've done a substantial amount of clearing out of old stuff. However, the old site is still available should you need to use it (see link on home page).
• We've tried to make the new site easily to navigate, as well as a lot more powerful.
• We're doing a lot more events than we did a few years ago, so we needed to upgrade and simplify the way we handle events on the website.
• We wanted to keep you quickly up-to-date with news and developments, so we're going to be blogging and posting news items. Who knows, we might even get Steve Thomas blogging!
• Over the coming months and years we see a lot of new initiatives and ministries starting, so we wanted to prepare the website for growth!
• We wanted to get the site fully-up-to-date with modern accessibility standards.

We'd love to know what you think - please send any comments to Oliver, who has been project managing the migration: oliverr@saltlight.org

The techie bits

Some of you will be interested in the techie info. For a Content Management System, we looked Mambo, Joomla, Plone, Churchinsight, to name but a few, but ended up with Drupal (www.drupal.org), an opensource (free!) system that is highly configurable and quite powerful. Our in-house designer Jason has done his bit, and we've contracted a couple of guys to help with the implemenation. Longer-term, we hope to be able to manage most of the day-to-day maintenance in-house, so we felt some up-front investment would help us reduce costs in the longer-term.