About This Site

Purpose

The UB.org website is the flagship website of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, USA. In that role, it provides a wide range of information and resources to people both within the United Brethren church and beyond.

While UB.org is our main site, our internet presence is actually distributed over several sites and servers:

• UB.org (about 1000 pages) and UBMissions.com (our Global Ministries site, over 200 pages) are both hosted on a G5 Mac Pro server at the national office.
• The church and Global Ministries personnel directories run on a Filemaker server (using a G5 Mac Pro) at the national office. The church directory provides a page for each UB church.
• The Healthy Ministry Resources site, which represents the work of the national office, is hosted by Bluehost.
• All news is located at UBCentral.org, a Wordpress site. There you'll find a news blog, the United Brethren Twitter feed, and the Huntington University Twitter news feed.
• All posts to UBCentral are automatically sent to Twitter as tweets.
• We have a United Brethren page on Facebook.

Our Internal Audience. This website exists primarily to serve United Brethren constituent churches and members. The site contains a wealth of information about the UB church and how we operate, and numerous resources which can be downloaded. If it can be put in digital form, we want to do so. And the website is the place to put it. We're talking about governing documents, logos, forms, manuals, photos, Powerpoint slides, and much more. The site also provides regular news about United Brethren happenings worldwide, and an extensive archive of past news items, plus scores of feature articles and columns written by United Brethren people.

Our External Audiences. At the same time, the website is frequented by hundreds of visitors from beyond the United Brethren church. Through the website, visitors from scores of countries visit the United Brethren natonal office.

• Newspaper reporters use the site to gain background information for stories--info about our leaders, history, structure, churches, statistics, etc.
• People doing geneological research send us several questions a month.
• College students use the site for research purposes.
• Ministers looking for employment learn about us before submitting a resume.
• Often, people find themselves on the UB website as a result of a Google search about clergy taxes, the Wright Brothers, or something else.

Design and Hardware

This website was designed entirely in Adobe Dreamweaver. Photoshop, ImageReady, and Fireworks were used to design graphics. BBEdit is a lot of help with text and general coding.

The searchable directories use Filemaker, a wonderful and highly user-friendly and customizable and all-around wonderful database. We use BestContactform.com for all forms.

Everything is done on a Macintosh. (All of the computers in the United Brethren national office are Macs.) Pages are also checked on a Dell Inspiron laptop, just to make sure things display okay on a PC. (Mac browsers seems to be far more forgiving when it comes to interpreting HTML code.)

The main server is a G5 Dual Macintosh running OSX Server 10.4. The email server runs Kerio MailServer on a G5 Mac Pro.

Internet Explorer will work best in displaying the pages of this site. Use at least version 4. If you're on a Mac, use the wonderful Safari or Firefox.

Most of the text is in the Verdana font. It's a free font from Microsoft. You should get the free Microsoft fonts, that typically come with installations of Explorer and other Microsoft programs--Arial, Arial Black, Georgia, Verdana, Courier, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Comic Sans, Andale, and Impact.

Steve Dennie is the sole designer and webmaster, so any typos and mistakes are his fault. Other problems, though, may be caused by the browser you're using or matters related to your service provider.