Dorchester Parish Website Meeting

Tuesday 22nd March 2005 at 20:00p.m. at The Wessex Hotel.

Minutes

Present: Richard Betts, Tricia Bowen, Richard Budd, Richard Cox and Mike Morgan.

The group welcomed Richard Budd to the group as the representative for St Mary’s and Richard Cox thanked him for the St Mary’s pages and looked forward to working with him in further developing the site.

Personal details on the website: It was agreed that telephone numbers and e-mails could be put up unless someone specifically asked us not to give out this information. It was not appropriate to include home addresses.

Ideas and suggestions: It was agreed that at the moment things were moving well for the Dorchester churches. It was to be hoped that West Stafford and Monkton would be present for the information evening, and that they would join in the not too distant future. At present, we need to make sure that we have all the relevant information about the churches but once we have this then we need to make the site more interactive and there were several suggestions about running a prize quiz, a crossword or a picture competition, to engender interest in the site.

Publicity and information evening: It was noted that the Echo had included information about the evening, having picked it up from the Parish Magazine which had also included a piece encouraging people to come. The congregations in each church had received a publicity hand-out asking them to attend on April 14th.

It was agreed that Richard Betts would introduce the evening; Richard Cox would do a tour of the site which would focus mainly on those who were unfamiliar with what was on offer. He has arranged to have a data projector for this. Mike Morgan will chair a question and discussion session. Richard Budd will provide a feedback form asking for their views on the website and any suggestions for improvement. There will be wine and nibbles available at the end, when people may want to speak to us individually with any observations.

Links to search engines: It was noted that Richard Cox had worked successfully on this and most common search engines will find the site reasonably quickly. The links to the diocese, the tourist information site and Churches Together in Dorset were working, although one or two were still having to leapfrog from the old site to the new. Richard Cox undertook to rectify this where he is aware of it.

Any other business: Richard Budd suggested setting up a simple system for allowing people to send information to the website. The group also considered using a logo for the site. Mike Morgan undertook to send a copy of the current Parish logo, which appears on Pews News etc. to Richard Budd to see if this could be used, although it was agreed that it might need to be simplified in order to reproduce well on the screen.

The meeting closed at 9.00 p.m.
- End of Meeting.