Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at Salisbury

By Ed Steffes

For the past few weeks, I’ve been immersed in the mechanics of website design, as we tweak our WordPress theme to get our site to look and act the way we want it to. (Pardon my jargon; WordPress is our design software, and a theme is a set of templates that give our website some basic organization.) So I’ve been dealing with widgets, plug-ins, menus, anchors, favicons, color codes, authoring privileges, and other such technical stuff.

Now that we are ready to publish the website, I want to take a step back from the mechanics in order to consider the meaning. What is it that we are creating here? What is a website, anyway?

In our case, I hope that the website will be a virtual extension of our face-to-face religious community. In part, that means making the site a good reflection of who we are, how we think, and what we do at UUFS. But it can also mean more than that. Media don’t just reflect social reality; they help create it. If we use our website well, it can actually help build and enhance our community. It can help us communicate with one another more effectively, learn about the diversity of spiritual paths our members follow, and encourage newcomers to join us. One thing that the WordPress blogging software does is allow users to post messages and comment on the messages of others. I hope that scattered among the movie announcements and invitations to breakfast we can find at least a few thoughtful commentaries to feed our minds and spirits. John Wright is leading the way with his “Minister’s Musings,” and he also wrote the beautiful welcome message for the home page. I invite you to join in a fellowship-wide effort to give UUFS the website it deserves, one that both informs and inspires.

A fashionable phrase these days is “It is what it is.” I envision a website that is too dynamic to deserve that static a description. I would rather say “It will be what we make it.”

Let me take this opportunity to thank those who have contributed content or feedback to the site so far, especially John, Lara and the members of the Website Committee: Al Beebe, Monika Pawliuk and Dianne Spery.