What’s Wrong with the Moriel Website? Good Things Are Coming!

By the time you read this we will have pushed out the first redesign of the Moriel website in many, many years. This is going to take awhile to complete 100%, so for a time most of the pages will look “new” but a lot of unconverted pages will continue to look exactly the same. Everything should basically work regardless. Here are the highlights of what you can expect:

• You can finally listen to sermons online again! Yeah.
  
• Articles and postings are being organized into a searchable database so you can retrieve all the articles for a particular category (e.g., “ecumenism”, “Benny Hinn”, etc.) with a single mouse click.
  
• You’ll be able to use news readers to be automatically notified of new content on the website. You won’t have to always personally check to see if something new has been posted. (In Geek-speak this is called “RSS” -- :”Really Simple Syndication”.)
  
• All transcribed sermons are in the process of being reformatted to make them easier to read online and made available for download in the PDF format. (This is ALL sermons in ALL languages.)
  
• We’ve now added the Moriel Glossary to provide our definition of terms, movements, and personalities.

Now I know some of you are probably saying, “It’s about time!” You have to understand that we’re dealing with a number of tricky issues, the first of which is that we’re an all-volunteer organization. As with just about any ministry, people come and go with varying levels of participation and the fact is that the original authors of the website are no longer with us. It’s been a struggle to coax out into the open the inner workings so we could understand how to proceed. (Try going back to the island the treasure was buried on without the guy who remembers where it’s buried and you get a sense of our situation.)
Secondly, web design has significantly changed over the past 10 years. How we approach things today is not how they were approached in the past. So part of the difficulty is not that anyone did anything “bad” or “wrong”, but is again an extension of being an all-volunteer organization. Most websites as popular as ours have a full-time staff to keep things current and on pace with technological changes – we obviously don’t and have had to play “catch up”.

The Good News: Links Still Work

Our biggest concern is the fact that literally thousands of web pages out on websites throughout the Internet are linked to articles and sermons on the Moriel website. If we just rename and moved everything, those links break and no one can easily find those articles and sermons any more. So we’ve had to carefully implement a strategy whereby we could do both at the same time.
When you go to a page, article, or sermon that’s been moved, you’ll get a message telling you so and suggesting you update your bookmark and then you’ll be automatically re-directed to its new location. So everyone’s existing links and bookmarks should continue to work properly. If you come across anything that appears “broken”, please bring it to the attention of morielcarol@yahoo.com

New Stuff

The Moriel Archive: This is the new database into which all articles are being organized. This not only allows us to categorize and index all the articles for fast and easy retrieval, but uses the aforementioned RSS technology to “push” notification of new articles out to your news reader. You’ll be able to search by major categories (e.g., “Church Issues”), by sub-categories (e.g., “Ecumenism”, “False Teachers”, etc.), and even all articles by a specific author (e.g., “Jacob Prasch”, “Jackie Alnor”, etc.).
The Moriel Glossary: Who is “Gerald Coates”? What exactly do theological terms like “Triumphalism” or “Dominionism” mean? As each online sermon is converted to the new format we are hyper-linking such terms to the Moriel Glossary. When you mouse over a term like “Dominionism”, Moriel’s definition of that term/movement/person is displayed. The entire glossary can be viewed alphabetically as well. We’ve become aware of the need to precisely define such terms because a lot of people use the same word or phrase to describe completely different things. (Go into a crowded room-full of Christians and just shout, “Calvinism!” and see what happens.)
Verse Linking: Throughout the site now whenever a Bible verse is referenced, simply hovering over it will cause a pop-up box to display the verse or verses in the NASB. This way you can check the verse without having to leave the actual page.

The Future

We’re not doing this because we simply wanted to change the color scheme. We’re providing a framework for specific expansion plans. Over the coming year our intention is to:

• Revamp the Moriel online stores. A significant change will be the ability to purchase and download sermons (both audio and video) directly to your computer.
• Transcribe and publish a greater number of sermons to be read or downloaded online.
• Customize each country’s main page. We want to give each local arm of Moriel greater latitude to communicate what is going on locally.
• Stream video sermons online. Jacob’s so handsome I have no idea why you’d merely want to listen to him when you can experience the eye candy of his personal appearance on screen.

As always we thank you for your patience as this is obviously a work in progress. We view the website as a tool of ministry whose goal should be the quick and orderly dissemination of information, not some kind of technological monument. Hopefully the changes we’re making will facilitate the message far more than the messengers.

Thanks for your continued support,
The Moriel Internet Team