For a number of years now, we’ve been talking about redesigning MMM. This has been a much harder process than I would have thought because of changes in the general organization of site assets, as well as other tasks relating to making a living out of this endeavor. That said, things have been happening on that front and I’m ready to put forward something of a beta to what would/could be a new iteration of MMM.

View the Alternate/Redesigned MMM (for those viewing this on their mobile device, see the note at the bottom of this posting for an additional step to see this)

This is following inline with some of the 2012 resolutions we’ve posted so far (practicing what we preach). This is also an evolution in the philosophy behind MMM in being more than simply a destination towards information, but a collection of those stories presented in a way that accents the use of mobile towards addressing those questions and implications of using mobile in faith-based contexts.

Goals of the Redesign
Of the comments most heard about MMM, one of the loudest has been in the findability of information on the site. Indeed, its an issue. This site has been in existence since 2005 and there’s over 3000 posts full of content. In addition to just having those posts, there’s been several themes that have run throughout the site, making it harder still to simply use a search box to figure a direction to find things. This design seeks to make the entry point to the content better (behind the scenes, content is literally being reorganized to fit a consistent paradigm).

The other goal of this redesign is to reflect the overall user experience (UX) goal we’d have for mobile applications. There are a few mobile applications that we’ve published to date, yet none of them were able to capture exactly the kind of reading, searching, and interactive experience that we’vev been after. After careful consideration of the options (using one or more content management services, developing several native applications, etc.), it was decided that to create a single webpage that had most of the features in a mobile-first role would be the direction. This would be incomplete without redoing the entire WordPress template, so this initial design was completed in order to test the feasability of moving forward.

Issues in This Redesign
Its one thing to go mobile-first, its another to meet each mobile device that comes here with the experience that’s best for their devices. This alternate landing page doesn’t address every mobile device. Its JavaScript-heavy, and has some features which would make some of our lower-end mobile devices, without a proxy-based browser such as Opera Mini, to choke on either the size or the features. Mobify is still being used to streamline the existing WordPress template’s pages for mobile viewing therefore. A complete theme would be mobile friendly (responsive web design methods) and might not need that help to do so.

Performance is also an issue. Thankfully, its a lot better than it was in initial testing (was very happy to get this onto the production server and see signifiant page loading gains). There’s going to be an issue though since there’s a JavaScript interpreter on the page rendering the Articles section, which makes for a potential bottleneck in loading for some browsers/devices. Ideally, a full WordPress template (written in PHP) would be better able to address this.

There are some more niggles. I’ll see more as time goes on. If you spot anything, let us know via Twitter (@mobileminmag). Small items will be fixed. Bigger items will be fixed in that WordPress version.

Resources to Address Issues/Goals
What’s good about this alternate homepage is that it is providing a means to relearn some JavaScript, brush up on HTML5 and its newer abilities, and finally put into practice some lessons about working with content management systems like WordPress which require not only development, but content strategy focuses. The resources to do all of this is widely available online, and is constantly tapped.

There are a number of people/groups in the Body who deal with aspects of building this which will also come in handy along the way. Web app developers, WordPress customizers, etc. have the kinds of collective wisdom that would be utilized to make this happen. If at some point the work goes beyond the time/abilities here, its possible that such a redesign project would be farmed out.

Lastly, there’s you. For those of you visiting the site daily – thank you. You coming to the site, offering feedback, or simply hitting areas (constantly) helps to direct projects like this towards completition. The more you use the site, especially this alternate version, then the better we are able to make a resource that fits your needs.

Implicaitons of This Design
There is a good chance that we will probably stick with a web-app method for delivering content from here on out. That would mean that building and maintaining apps which also publish this site’s content would only be done as a means to explore the workings of content mangement systems and publishing experiences, rather than anything strategic towards pushing this site forward.

Another, probably more jarring, implication to this design is that we would be (finally) going back to our roots in respect to being mobile-first in everything. This could mean shorter articles, but definitely means more flexibility and versatility in the data streams that make up MMM. For example, we have a “tab” which has a link to all the places we conduct conversations online. Such an item could easily become a single page stream and RSS/XML feed for those who would rather find content in those methods.

The design is using features of CSS and HTML which are more advanced. Based on some of the stats we can gather form those visiting MMM, those features are supported by those visits. However, that’s not a 100% solution. We would like to be as close to 100% mobile compliant, and not at all desktop browser compliant. We’d like to drive the desktop browser experience to primarly search and RSS versus casual browsing.

We are also going to slowly start making the shift towards getting away from email for non-collaborative tasks, and use Twitter as a means to not just be poked about items, but also conduct the initial parts of conversations. Until we do something a but broader federated (identi.ca and/or XMPP-based stuff from our server), that would help us to best triage communications and move quickly towards managing opportunities in this space.

Or you can look at it in this simple statement: we are going even more mobile and virtual and dragging you along for the ride 🙂

What’s Left?
Using it, finishing the WordPress custom theme conversion, making mobile apps match its UX… ya know, the normal 😉

Just go to http://mobileministrymagazine.com/m.html and have a go at it.

Note for Those Coming from The Mobile Site
If you are reading this from the mobile site, then on clicking this link, you will have to click the link that says Full Site on that page. That’s simply because of how links from our use of Mobify behave.