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.

Our Internal Audience. The 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 Offices. 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.

The UB.org domain hosts nearly 1000 pages. The UBMissions.com domain includes another 300 pages. The UBOnline.org domain, which is integrated seemlessly with the UB.org domain, hosts our blogs and the News pages, and handles all forms processing; it contians about 100 pages. Finally, our Filemaker database provides a page for each of our 220 churches, plus a page for each missionary.

Design and Hardware

This website was designed entirely in Macromedia Dreamweaver. Photoshop, ImageReady, and Fireworks are 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. The forms are hosted on Aplus.net server, where we have our UBOnline.org domain.

Everything is done on a Macintosh. (All of the computers in the United Brethren Offices 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 Communigate Pro on a G4 Mac.

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.

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.