We’ve been hard at work tweaking the design, running code queries, and even installing new applications to make this iteration of ChurchCrunch (and the rest of the 8BIT Network) the best community platform ever.

I’ve learned a lot about how this community responds to change and have taken extensive notes on how to make it better. Hopefully most of the redesign has made that kind of impact and it’s my hope that when you get to one of our properties you just leave feeling “good.”

We’re in the business of creating environments besides effective and entertaining content; we want to create an experience, and even more than that, a conversation in the context of community.

So, without further ado, here are some of the updates that we’ve made in the last week since relaunching the new design:

Subcategories:

The last year was extremely formative in my understanding of how to best leverage categories, sub-categories (or child categories as I call them) and systems. I’ve taken notes, made some adjustments, hacked mySQL dbase, and more (to align tags and categories, flush out dead ends, etc) and have landed somewhere pretty nicely.

Ultimately it had as much to do with design as function: A vertical drop-down kept the profile low and unobtrusive to the eye while strategic and targeted sub-categories for uX was made as a commitment for quick browsing to the “good stuff.”

Contests/Giveaways, Conferences, Twitter, and Wordpress are obvious choices and we’ve had over 200 posts in some of those child-cats alone. The way I see it, the sub-cats were already happening. Decisions based on need and not negotiation are far better fare long term.

Less Bloat, Less Gimmick:

A thoughtful commentator mentioned how the aggregation between the RSS Subscribers and the Twitter followers was bloated and “gimmicky.” We want you to know that we listened, and although I can understand the perspective I’ve watched a number of top tier blogs add the two to provide a true source of representative traffic power.

What we did, though, was add the RSS subscriber base to our much larger Twitter count (@Human3rror) instead of the network site. That was certainly bloat.

But, the fact remains that both counts are now culturally providing a better sense of traffic generation.

And it just makes sense when 13% to 25% of the traffic to some blogs is via Twitter alone. ChurchCrunch last year averaged nearly 13% traffic-gen from just one Twitter account (@Human3rror) and we aim to keep it that way (and increase!).

The bottom line is that we simply cannot discount the power of the Twitter-virus and we’d like for the visitors to know that if we’re going to do things well and we believe our content is good, we’re going to drive it home. Be a part of something big.

More Conversation, Replies:

I thought we could swing a limit of up to 2 replies per comment but I was wrong; so we added an additional 3. You can now reply and have a more robust conversation in the commenting area than ever before. There is a small graphical error that occurs with the live-preview and we’re going to fix that right up (after I finish this post I guess) but otherwise that should be good enough.

And to be quite honest, I hope this will increase the thoughtfulness of commentators as they begin to understand the limitations that we’ve set. Who knows, is that too idyllic?

We’ll see.

More Cross Pollination via Tabs:

There is now more than ever an opportunity to provide robust cross pollination because we simply have more properties to run with.

You’ll begin to discover cross-posts, series posts, and segmentation across the entire network for a deeper brand appreciation and experience.

In addition, of course, the traffic will naturally increase as an outcause. The use of tabs is one simple way to introduce your audience and visitors to the elements and content within the other network blogs.

There will be definitely more strategy that we’ll share as the platforms mature but we’re pretty excited as the studies have shown to prove their worth.

We can’t wait.

Prayer, Deeper Community:

One of the things that I’ve personally lamented was the fact that I could too easily be wrapped up in the technological community more than the spiritual side of what we do.

Literally, my prayers were answered with The Prayer Engine launching publicly only a few days ago.

I had planned to create a separate forum (actually completely rebuilding the forum, but we’ll give you more deets on that later) dedicated to prayer but that would require things like registration and overly-complex administration. In addition, it would be just too heavy of an app for such a small (but great!) need.

So, you can now join with us in a community of prayer right here on all the 8BIT Network sites (check the bottom left-footer of each blog).

We’ve got the prayers aggregated via RSS and I really hope this will increase the sense of community beyond the technological-jargon and creative-speak; that ultimately we’re a community of spiritually-minded people who love God and who love one another enough to pray.

I couldn’t be more happy with the timing and so far Eric and Cleve’s little app is doing big things here, and more to come I’m sure.

Competition. Hurray!

This section still needs a bit of design love but the effect is the same. One of the tried and true motivators that exist in humans is the sense of competition (and the need for recognition).

We’ve decided to play “primal” and just go with the flow (or we decided to just follow Rule #6 of our “7 Elements of a Successful Social Network.“).

Adding a Top Weekly Commenters function on the sidebar will do just fine, and if you’ve got the itch to be #1 ever single week then trust us, we’re not stopping you.

Go ahead and be bad.

But Wait, There’s More!

And there is.

The problem (or solution?) is that you can’t actually see them. We’ve been experimenting with the W3 Total Cache Plugin for Wordpress and have tweaked and customized the heck out of it.

The reason you can “zip” between all the network sites without considering to get up and refill your coffee mug is because the Amazon S3 system is killing it in terms of reducing our requirements on our dedicated boxes at Media Temple.

We’ve also streamlined every mySQL table that exists and queried for every empty tag, category, and string. Of course, all of these are transparent to you, except for the speed.

It’ll cost us a few more dollars but we think it’ll save you more time (and money) if you don’t have to wait for the pages to load.

Finally, there are a number of small tweaks and additions/subtractions that only a super-geek and/or nerd would notice, like increasing the homepage count from 7 posts to 10 but saving the same amount of horizontal scrolling due to our use of Wordpress’s new v2.9.1 Post Thumbnails feature.

By increasing the post count we increase retention (generally speaking) while not requiring too far of a jump in terms of scrolling behavior (yeah, I’m a nerd… I studied Psychology of Design and uX in my Undergrad…).

Built on Industry and Coding Standards:

We’ve been stripping and combining code from our original product and introducing the core code that we designed for the new Standard Theme that’ll be released later this month.

Essentially, the blogs within our network are running on some of the best coded Wordpress Themes on the planet (and yes, we’re proud of that).

We’ve been studying SEO best practices and experimenting with code bits for months and we’re pretty happy on where we’ve landed.

The best part is that you’ll be able to buy a copy of the “base” theme very soon so you too can reap the benefits of an awesome, streamlined, and well-developed blog. Our title tags alone will make it worth the coin.

We can’t wait to release it.

This is Just the Beginning:

Wow, can you believe this is just after the first 168 hours?

There’s still so much more to do and we’re working toward making these blogs and our properties the best in the business, not just because we want to but because we’re compelled to be excellent and to achieve excellence in all that we do.

We can do no other!

We’ve had a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to this network growing and maturing into an amazing community focused on providing exceptionally valuable content to the Church and the world.

It’s you that motivates us toward excellence.

Thanks for joining us and hang on tight.