Oliver Waterhouse
Quaker Life

Hello everyone,

Here are the notes from this week’s Meeting House Matters.

Our theme for this discussion was out meeting websites. We explored a few of the sites to get a feel for their features and what they do to promote Quakerism and our lettings businesses.

The next online session will be on Friday, 15 September at 10.30am. The joining details are below and will also be shared again by email nearer the time.

• Join Zoom Meeting: https://quaker.zoom.us/j/81586087624?pwd=VHk3MW9sTHJUVDdsMFlTMUN3WEpmUT09
• Meeting ID: 815 8608 7624
• Passcode: WT-online

Notes

We looked at the following sites during the session:

• https://bradfordonavonquakers.weebly.com/
• https://www.lewesquakers.org.uk/
• https://alton.quakermeeting.org/
• https://bolton.quakermeeting.org/
• https://bristolquakers.org.uk/

The sites vary in provider from those that are hosted freely using a platform that advertises on the site to other that are paid for domains and web packages. Many meetings have started moving towards using Quaker Meeting Network, https://quaker.app/about/, and are finding the additional services that are provided with it helpful.

We need websites that are:

• accessible to everyone.
• are easy to train a range of people to update and take responsibility for.
• easy to navigate.
• are nice to look at and make the user want to look for longer or at more.

Photos

Some of the sites are using images to help tell the story and to break up the pages. It is good to:

• Have people in images.
• Think about what the image is for, does it tell a story of community? Or does it help sell a room for hire?
• Have an image that helps to say something that could remove some of the text from a page?
• Make images that are accessible to everyone?

Naming rooms on your website

Why are you naming a room?

• Does the Quaker community want to have a room named after a beloved Friend or a Quaker value?
• Does it help to describe a space that is available for hire?
• Could a number or a different name help to make the room’s use clearer?

Quaker Meetings Network

• Lots of good support and very responsive team.
• Intranet for internal AM / LM use is really helpful.
• File storage helps to manage the archiving and indexing.
• Easy to set up and good support and can maintain current domain.
• There are some films that help set it up and good things that have been said about it. See, https://quaker.app/about/discover/.

Integrations

• Hallmaster, see the film made about Hallmaster at our previous MHM session, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKW55XBJLc8.

In friendship,

Oliver

Oliver Waterhouse (he/him)

Quaker Life Team Leader, Local and Area Governance

Quakers in Britain

020 7663 1007 (Direct)

oliverw@quaker.org.uk | www.quaker.org.uk

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