Over the past few months, we’ve been working away to bring you this new website and it’s exciting to finally unveil it. Having been involved in marketing in one way or another for over 10 years with the majority being for Christian organisation, I have had the opportunity to reflect upon the place of marketing within faith. Marketing principles and practices don’t always mix well with Christianity and we do well not to import them uncritically into church. However, with that caveat made, at its heart, it’s not unlike evangelism: we have some good news to tell and we want to communicate it well.
And so that’s what lies behind this new website – I believe in the vision of the Scottish Baptist College and we, the SBC team, want to ensure that you have all the information you need in the most straight-forward way. We’ve worked alongside Maxim and his team at MediaCabin (a great organisation sympathetic to our Christian ethos) to strip back the website to bring you a no-nonsense resource which we hope helps you find all that you need to!
What’s new?
The first step was to think about our constituents – who will be using the website and why? We’ve tried to slim down the menu system and freshen up the homepage in such a way that you’ll know exactly where to go to find the information you need. Whether it’s checking up where and when events are on or reading the latest blog, it shouldn’t be hard for you to find what you’re looking for. In redesigning the homepage to be visually-appealing, as well as functional, we orientated it around five “windows” to help you to see “inside” the rest of the website.
We’ve also added a few pages to help you get to know us a bit better – a FAQ page to preempt those questions we know you’ll want the answers to, a new “where to find us” page (anyone who has visited SBC and tried to find us within the UWS campus will appreciate the necessity of the information!), and significantly a new vision page. As the page reads, our vision comes from a sense of what we already do, as well as reminding ourselves of the things we think are important. Refreshing the website and branding was the right opportunity to clarify these thoughts into our most recent vision statement and we hope you are as excited by it as we are. If you know us already, we hope in the vision statement you’ll be able to recognise the College as we are today; and if you don’t know us yet, we hope it will encourage you to get to know us better.
What’s next?
We’ll be continuing to add to the website as we have new information or news but please do get in contact if you spot anything that needs changed or if you have any ideas about how to improve the website. For the most up to date information and an insight into the more everyday life of the College like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter. If you’ve not been to the College in a while and would like to reconnect then please do contact us and arrange to drop in for our daily coffee times.
Graham Meiklejohn (on behalf of the SBC team)
Communications Coordinator and Lecturer in Theology