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Website Information

Welcome to the St. Philips Church, Joppa website. The website was originally launched in early 1999 to give the congregation information about services and events after the devastating fire of December 1998. Since then it has grown considerably, in both scope and content, has undergone two redesigns and had over 10,000 hits. A third major redesign, which required a rewrite of the entire website, was launched at the start of March 2010; the brand new look-and-feel should, hopefully, be easier and nicer to use and make the site accessible to a wider audience.

Layout
Each St. Philips Church website page is split into three main parts: the Header; Content; and Footer. The Header displays the title for the site and the navigation options for the page you are viewing, the Content shows the actual page that you are looking at and the Footer shows links to pages within the site that you might be interested in along with copyright information.

Navigation
The navigation for the site is hopefully clear and intuitive. It is shown across the top of each page and allows access to every page in the website. Pages within the site have been grouped into five main Sections. The Sections are always shown in the top row of the Navigation and the Pages that are within the current Section are shown below. The Home link will always return you to the Home Page that you will have been presented with upon your first visit to the site. The entire website is laid out within the Site Map page, which can be found in the Information section or by following the permanent link within the Footer of each page in the site.

Hot Links
The pages within the website that we think you will be most interested in are marked as Hot Links and are shown in the Footer section of the page, along with being listed on the Home Page.

Accessibility
The main reason for redesigning the site was to make St. Philip’s Church website more accessible to a greater number of people. To do this I have introduced various measures which adhere sensibly and practically to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) produced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, the web's governing body).

For those not familiar with the WCAG, this is a set of checkpoints designed to ensure that web sites are designed and written properly. For example:

  • Images have alternative text (so if you can't see the image you can still understand what it contains).
  • Colour contrast between foreground and background is sufficiently strong.
  • Text resizes according to user preference.
  • Headings are correctly used (they're not just ordinary text made to look big and bold).
  • Links make sense by themselves (e.g. no instances of links that say "Click here" or "More...").
  • Tables are used for laying out tabular information and have proper headings and summaries.
  • Visual presentation is defined in 'style sheets' and is not embedded in the pages.

A hidden menu has been placed at the beginning of each page to allow users to link directly to the main areas of the page. The menu uses Access Keys, and I have followed the UK government standard which is:

  • s - Skip to content
  • 1 - Jump to Home Page
  • 3 - Jump to Site Map
  • 0 - Jump to Access Key Defaults (this page).

The Main Menu on every page also has Access Keys which will take you to the main sections of the website, as follows:

  • c - Communication Section
  • g - Gallery Section
  • i - Information Section
  • w - What's On

To use the Access Keys in Internet Explorer, hold Alt and press the shortcut key, then press Enter. In Firefox, hold Alt and Shift and press the shortcut key. On a Macintosh, hold Control and press the shortcut key. A hidden link has also been provided at the beginning of each page to provide easy access to the information on accessibility.

Further Help
If you

  • Have problems seeing the screen
  • Find it difficult to use the mouse or keyboard
  • Need help with language or reading (e.g. dyslexia)

Then I recommend that you visit AbilityNet’s My Computer My Way (opens in a new window) website which provides lots of advice on how to make your computer easier to use. AbilityNet (opens in a new window) are experts in the field of computing and disability and they provide a free service to individuals with disabilities to assess their computing needs.

If you do have any trouble accessing the site, please email me to let me know the difficulties that you are having. You can either use the Contact Us page within the Communication Section or follow the Contact Us link at the foot of every page and select Website Enquiries in the Message For box. Please state the particular page within the site that you are having difficulty with, if applicable, and what problems you are experiencing.