Dear Friends;

 

Regarding content on the website, I thought it might be helpful to provide some background on how the website got to where it is today as well as the developmental directions in which it is evolving.  There are Internet services which the Fellowship provides such as internal email lists, internal announcements, etc.  These are somewhat exterior to the website as it is perceived by the public and will not be addressed here. 

 

The website began as my personal project and this project had two aspects.  The first related to internal Urantia movement politics.  This was a period of time (in the mid-90s) when the trustees of Urantia Foundation were trying to convince the readership that they had a special connection with the revelators and that the rest of us had a responsibility to follow their lead.  They cited various messages that had supposedly been received in the past and in general tried to foster a belief that their decisions were derived from a mandate given to the original trustees by the revelators.  I felt that this attempt to create a power structure on the basis of purported secret documents (as well as the assumption that the revelators would confer such powers upon the participants in a particular human organizational structure) was not consistent with reality and very dangerous to the long term welfare of the revelation -- its natural outcome over time could easily become another structure like the Vatican or the administration of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  I felt that everyone in the reader community should have access to the same information, the same historic documents, the same internal memos, and so forth.  From this it would be possible for the community to make more informed choices and it would prevent or minimize the ursupation of power by an elite claiming to have access to special information or to having been cosmically ordained.

 

So a major part of the website was the publication of all historic documents that could be located. (There are still several file drawers filled with historic documents which have yet to be scanned and published.)  This effort was helped by additional work done by Saskia with regard to the Sherman documents, and to Larry Mullins with the publication of his history.  Hopefully, there is now enough information available to prevent an undesirable encapsulating of the revelation in a power structure of authority.

 

Secondly, it was clear that the Internet provided a means of making all study aids, texts, indexes, conference talks, etc., freely available to the readership without the overhead of print media publishing.  The website was thus conceived as an archive, a library, containing all of the documents of the movement, including photos, audio, and eventually video materials.  This is, of course, a long term project but it is well underway. 

 

The materials in this archive, or library, are organized by topical indexes. If you go to the site index page at http://urantiabook.org/ghindex.html you will see a list of secondary indexes in a table at the top of the page.  These indexes lead to papers and study aids based on topic -- science, philosophy, religion, spirituality, and so forth.

 

Because of the political climate at the time the basis of the website was created, it was decided to focus on promoting the book -- trying to get people interested in reading the Urantia Book.  There was a clear decision not to promote the Fellowship or any other social grouping of readers, that the website should be a comfortable place for all readers of the Urantia Book to visit and use regardless of their political or organizational interests.  This has been further expanded with the addition of polylingual resources where there is a need to present materials as freely as possible from specific cultural biases that inevitably accompany graphics or other contextualization.  This approach has changed somewhat in the intervening time with the Fellowship as an organization now a little more foregrounded.  But very little is done in the way of overt promotion of the organization while emphasis is kept on trying to stimulate interest in the Urantia Book.

 

So to summarize, the purpose of the website is to be an archive of all documents and media related to the readership of the Urantia Book.  This material should be organized in a manner which enables readers to find what they are looking for, and to interest new visitors in getting to know more about the Urantia Book. Virtually all books about designing successful websites emphasize content, content, content -- content which meets people's needs and which is easy for them to find.  Everything else related to the website from graphics to programming languages needs to be subordinated to this overarching purpose.  Determining whether or not this content meets their needs and is easy to find can only be determined from an analysis of visitor's usage patterns.  It is not something that we can determine from our various personal philosophical perspectives.

 

There is additional method to this madness.  Relatively few visitors enter the website through the home page.  People go to the Internet to find information and they do this using search engines such as Google or Altavista.  By making a wide range of information related to the Urantia Book available in our archive, we should be able to attract a wide range of inquirers to the book.  We have this information on the website but there is a great deal of work which needs to be done to get our documents to surface in the first few returns to these search engines.  At any rate, this variety of information provides a foundation for attracting more visitors in the future.

 

Another feature of this approach is that it enables us to discover ways in which the book is relevant to the world and what areas of the text we need to exploit to generate more interest.  We each have our own personal sense of what the world needs from this revelation, but how informed is that sense?  We have well over 1,000,000 visitors to the website each year. An evaluation of these visitors over a period of one or two years should provide us with a statistically significant sampling that will enable us to have solid data on what people find useful in the book.  This can then become the basis for the creation of better introductory materials, secondary works, conference themes, etc. 

 

Mo is the only one who has done any significant market studies of the book and what attracts potential readers.  Because the results of these studies conflicted with the personal prejudices of many readers, much of it has been ignored. This is a pretty stupid way to proceed if we're truly concerned about objective results for the Kingdom rather than the promotion of our own personal viewpoints.  My point is that these decisions need to be made by evaluating objective information rather than by using political machinations to enable one subjective view to prevail over another.  It really involves a choice between finding and following the truth, or attempting to manipulate reality to correspond with one's personal beliefs. 

 

To make an issue of "content" is to have a misperception of what the website is and the processes by which websites are used.  Our "content" consists of a growing library of all materials generated by the readership.  A more productive way of looking at the website would be to consider the indexes, the navigational structure, and other elements which lead visitors to specific information or which lead them to have a particular sense of what the Urantia Book is about. 

 

In keeping with the approach used with the history documents -- make documents available and let the readers make decisions about their meaning -- the archive of reader materials is constructed in the same way.  The objective is to simply make these materials available and let visitors decide for themselves what their value might be.  I have tried to avoid having any kind of ideological bent to the website other than presenting the Urantia Book.  (This means not publishing materials generated by spinoff groups such as the Teaching Mission, Aquarian Concepts Community, Earth Order of Melchizedek and other groups, although we provide links to some of their websites from our "Reader's Websites" page.)

 

If you visit the Mormon website ( http://www.lds.org/ ) or the Vatican site ( http://www.vatican.va/ ) you will quickly see that these sites are constructed around the promotion of a particular ideological position.  I have felt it important that the website *not* try to foster a particular ideological orientation to the book and I have attempted to manage it accordingly. 

 

So, given the above, how are decisions made about which links should be most prominent and which information should be easiest to find?  Everyone seems to have an opinion about what graphics should appear on the home page, what color titles should be, etc.  But these are only personal preferences and are not a solid basis for creating a relevant website.  The answer has to be derived from a good statistical analysis of website visitors.  It is possible to know where each visitor comes from, what words they put into a search engine to find the site, what they were looking for, the sequence of pages they followed when they visited the website, how often they returned, what additional information did they try to find by putting words into our site search engine, etc.  The structure of the website needs to correspond to information derived from an analysis of this information. 

 

Up to the present our gathering of some of this information has been rather crude and there is reason to believe that the results have not been very reliable.  In 2006 I will be installing some analysis software on the website which will generate far more reliable information about our visitors and what they are looking for.  We can also integrate this information with information from various search engines about the search words being entered.  From this we can do a far better job of structuring the website so that it is easy for people to find the information they are looking for and find it in a context which leads them to discover the Urantia Book.  There is a long-term interplay and process of refinement which must go on here between analyzing the reasons people come to the website and then optimizing the website to meet their needs.  By the end of 2006 we should have some very good information to work with.   

 

It is very important to understand that websites are not like magazines on a rack in a bookstore.  When you go to the bookstore you scan the available collection and various graphic and textual devices are employed to draw your attention to a specific magazine.  On the Internet, people are using search engines to look for specific information and the challenge is to structure the website, its documents, and the management of search engines so that people easily find the information they are looking for and discover the Urantia Book in the process.

 

In addition, it must be appreciated that the information on our Web server needs to be technically structured so that it is easily accessible by the increasingly wide range of communications devices which can access Web servers.  Increasingly the website will be an archive of information accessible from a wide range of access points, some of them with graphic capabilities, others with only text, audio, or video access capabilities.  We will need to be able to efficiently serve all of these requests.

 

I have felt it is important not to duplicate effort.  There is a great deal of work getting all this stuff to work.  Fortunately there are a number of readers who have developed websites specialized in areas other than the provision of an archive.  Pat McNelly's UBRON site (http://www.ubron.org) serves an important function in the community.  Mo and Paula's Truthbook site (http://www.truthbook.com/) is an inspirational contribution to the overall effort.  Barry Clark's translation portal (www.TheUniversalFather.org) is a very valuable addition to the effort.  It is much better in our present situation of limited resources and limited participation by qualified individuals to simply provide links to these other resources rather than trying to duplicate or compete with them.  Hopefully more such websites will come online as we proceed.  Readers with specialized viewpoints should create their own websites.  Good examples are the Teaching Mission site (www.lightandlife.com), UB Comix (http://www.us75.com/mindful/urantiana/ubcomix/), Square Circles Publishing (http://www.squarecircles.com/), Biker Planet (http://www.cosmicbiker.com/) and many others which you can find listed at www.urantiabook.org/ub_links.htm. 

 

Remeber that all this Internet and Web stuff has evolved since most of us were more deeply involved in the educational process.  If you have not continued to read and keep up with related changes in terms of understanding how information is processed by humans, you may be relating to the Web as a modification of your TV set, or an electronic magazine.  There is some catching up to do.  The amount of information made available by the Web increases by many orders of magnitude the amount of information available to the individual.  There is a corresponding change in the way this information needs to be made available lest the searcher get lost in the forest. 

 

At the very least, persons wishing to participate in an informed conversation about website development direction should read, "Information Architecture: An Emerging 21st Century Profession" by Earl Morrogh, published by Prentice Hall.  This short, non-technical book contains a very interesting history of language and communications media, along with a very good discussion about the way in which these various media transform our understanding of information, how information is presented, how it is accessed, and how it changes the human experience.  I consider it essential background for anyone wanting to participate in a discussion about website development.  The web is not television, not a magazine, not a collection of sales brochures.  It has its own requirements for effective use. 

 

For readers who have no interest or time in becoming more informed about the technical side of this, there is still a great deal to be done.  One of the greatest needs in the propagation of the revelation is the creation of introductory and overview materials.  If you have tried to create some of this material, you know how difficult it is.  New translations are coming online and new readers want some orientation from experienced readers.

 

Topical study aids are very important.  With good topical studies we get better search engine exposure.  The creation of good study aids and analytical papers related to the book has come to nearly a complete halt with the present generation of readers.  Why is this?  Good introductions make the teachings of the book relevant to people with different religious and philosophical backgrounds.  For this reason, a wide range of introductory materials needs to be created in order to make the book relevant to potential readers. 

 

In the future the website will be segmented to provide information and services to multiple groups.  Some documents will be available only to members; some to officers and administrators, with others available for the general public.  One of the most helpful things a content committee could do would be to help develop this segmentation architecture by categorizing existing documents and study aids. 

 

Another task which a content committee could undertake is the evaluation of other websites.  The committee members should spend some considerable time visiting other religious and philosophical websites.  Which ones do you like?  Which ones don't you like?  Why?  Which ones do you think are better than ours?  Why?  Answers to these questions would be very helpful.

 

An ideal content committee would function over a long period of time.  There are content related matters which take months or even years to develop and implement.  One of the biggest contributions which such a committee could make would be to become familiar with website statistical analysis and search engine optimization.  This is a specialized area but not highly technical.  However, it does require a commitment over time.  It is not an issue that can be taken care of with a few conference calls or committee meetings. 

 

For persons who would like to be better informed about these matters, here is a short bibliography.

 

"Designing Large-Scale Web Sites" by Darrell Sand, published by John Wiley.

"Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications" by Bob Baxley, published by New Riders.

"Maintaining and Evolving Successful Commercial Web Sites" by Ashley Friedlein, published by Morgan Kaufmann.

"Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience" by Jennifer Fleming, published by O'Reilly.

"Building Enterprise Information Architectures" by Melissa Cook, published by Prentice Hall.

 

A more technical but extremely informative book is:

"Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, published by O'Reilly.

 

Bear in mind that our Spanish language website gets more traffic than the English website.  There are additional cultural factors added here that are not described above.

 

I hope this is helpful.

 

David