Welcome To Our Website 

History

Following a pulpit request from the then parish priest, Fr Terry Tastard, for someone to create an on-line presence for the parish, the St Mary & St Joseph website first went live in mid-March 1999 in a fairly rudimentary state.  Fr Terry was its first editor and over the next five years he extended the scope.   When Fr John Byrne came to be parish priest in September 2003, he asked Ann Dodd, the parish Communications Co-ordinator, to edit the site which was fully revised, updated and extended over the next twelve months and continued to grow for the following six years.

In 2010, Fr John instigated a root and branch review of the site along with extending it to a family of four sites:

The design of the four sites follows a common theme, albeit with differing colour schemes, with the top site having items relevant to all parishes and the other three having items mainly specific to the individual parishes. 

As the oldest of the four, the Boxmoorcatholic.org site is the most mature in its content but this group of sites is a work in progress as well as a labour of love for the many, many people involved in the technical, editorial and content aspects of the sites and the other three will be well on the way to maturity by the end of 2011.

Updating & Communicating

We update the site on a regular basis. 

There is a weekly update to the Newsletter and at least a weekly update to the Future/Recent/Past Events pages. 

On the Home Page we show the main changes that occurred recently.

We are currently running a pilot scheme utilising Twitter as a notification medium for any changes we make. 

Some people are full Twitter users and "follow" Boxmoorcatholic and others have just signed up for the text message to their mobile 'phone service by texting "follow boxmoorcatholic" to 86444.

We also send out reminders about events, the day before and on the morning of the day on which they occur, and we hope that this has improved attendances at parish events and fundraising activities.

Site Structure

Each site has three screen areas or Frames.

At the top of the screen is a frame which has static information, e.g. the church name and address, and some standard links such as the site search function.

At the left hand side of the screen is a frame which has the main Contents menu along with links to the Newsletter and articles on Future, Recent and Past parish events.

The main body of the screen opens up with the Home Page and any other web pages, which are selected from links on the top or side frames, are displayed in this area.

To aid finding what you are looking for, there are standard Site Map and Search functions amongst the Top Frame links and an Alphabetic Contents page as the first link in the Table of Contents in the Left Frame.

Screen Size

We have designed the site around a minimum screen size and resolution of a 17” screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio set to 1024x768 pixels.  If your screen is smaller than this then some of the pages might look a little squashed or have wrap arounds which make them less than perfect to view.  We have managed to use the site, albeit significantly less than ideally, on a smartphone (a Blackberry Bold 9000) so it should be viewable whatever size screen you have.  More than 90% of desktop & laptop screens in use today are sized at or larger than the minimum design size.

Browsers

We are able to get statistics of what browsers are used to access the site and over 80% of our users use some version of Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the site.  For this reason, we routinely test the site, and all updates, with Microsoft's Internet Explorer versions 8&9 (IEv8 and IEv9).  If you are having difficulties it might be because you are using a different version or one of the other popular browsers

• Mozilla Firefox

• Opera

• Google Chrome

• Apple Safari

We do some testing with the other browsers but, if you're having problems, please let us know which page and which browser (and its version) and we'll see if we can fix the site to work for you but, as we are all volunteers with day jobs, we can't guarantee to find a resolution in a short period of time.  We are aware that some of the code on the site is not fully compliant with the latest HTML standards and we are working our way through getting this rectified but we do know that the site works fine for the vast majority of our visitors.  Opera in particular is giving us some challenges which do not exhibit with the other browsers.

Feedback

We hope that you like our parish website and would be very pleased to receive comments, both good and bad, about it.

Our website is one of the ways in which we communicate with each other and if it fails to do that then we need to know.

The sorts of comments you might like to make are in the following areas, all of which have changed significantly with the 2010 redesign of the site:

• The Content

  • Is there a subject area you would like to see but we don't have?

  • Is there an inaccuracy in the content that is there e.g. it might be out of date?

• The Format

  • Do you like the colour scheme?

  • Do you like the font (it's called Calibri) and is it easy to read, big enough and an appropriate colour?

• The Navigation

  • Could you find what you wanted to easily?

  • Were the menus easy to use and to understand?

  • Are the Site Map, Search Function and Alphabetic Contents pages helpful and easy to understand?

• Browser Compatibility - we know it works OK with Microsoft's Internet Explorer versions 8&9 (IEv8 and IEv9) but if you are having difficulties it might be because you are using a different version or one of the other popular browsers

  • Mozilla Firefox

  • Opera

  • Google Chrome

  • Apple Safari

  If you're having problems then let us know which page and which browser (and its version) and we'll see if we can fix the site to work for you.

• Screen Compatibility - we originally designed the site to look best in the commonest of screen sizes and resolutions (a 17” screen with a 5:4 aspect ratio set to 1280x1024 pixels) but following feedback, particularly from laptop users, we have reoptimised some of the pages to fit in screens 1024 pixels wide.  We hope that this will help.
  
  If you are having difficulty viewing the site because it just won't fit properly on your screen then please let us know and give us the following information if possible

  • Your Browser and its version

  • Your screen size (this is the viewable area, measured diagonally, in inches)

  • The resolution your screen is set to - finding this out is different for the varying flavours of Microsoft Windows and also for the LINUX and Apple operating systems but if you can't work it out contact us anyway and we'll try to help.