Welcome to the newly-redesigned and rebuilt King of Kings Community website! Don't worry - everything from the previous site is still here. Look through the menus up above to get an overview of the site, or drill down to a specific topic with our new Tags system!

It's been quite a while since our previous site launched - 3 years to the day, actually. In that time, much has changed. We've found ourselves using our previous site differently from how we initially envisioned - but that's not a bad thing. We initially launched with audio sermons and a hope to start doing video sermons as well. But sooner than we thought, we found ourselves using streaming video not just for sermons, but for Torah Portions, music videos recorded live, news and prayer updates, and more recently, on-location teachings. However, we were pushing the limits of what could be done with the previous website, and the time had come to do something about it.

Behind the Scenes

Once websites reach a certain size, it is no longer feasible to run and maintain them as static files on a server. The need for a simple way to add content and an easy way for webmasters to maintain the sites resulted in the creation of Content Management Systems (CMS). These systems are what nearly all medium and large website use to power their site. The CMS manages content separately from design, thus allowing new content to be simply and dynamically inserted into an existing page, or existing pages to be given complete visual overhauls without affecting the content they display.

The CMS we chose to use for our previous website was a fairly simple system, without much in the way of extra features. Its simplicity was one of elegance, however, not plainness, and it served us well for the time we were using it. However, as time went on, and as we generated more and more different types of content, its one-size-fits-all approach became quite limiting.

After researching our options, we decided upon a different CMS that would give us nearly endless flexibility, allowing us to properly manage virtually any kind of content we would need to deal with. This new system also has a number of additional features built-in, such as Tags, Comments, User Accounts, Discussion Forums, Photo Galleries, and more. Although most of these have not been made ready for the launch of the new website, the Tag system has, and we will be working on integrating many of the other features as time goes on.

Tags

The new Tags system is an exciting way of finding content on a topic you're interested it. If you've used any similar systems, such as Gmail's Labels, you might have an idea of the benefits that the Tags system has to offer. With Gmail's labels, instead of filing emails in the one folder that suits them the best, you can apply as many labels as you want to that email. So instead of figuring out whether that email from your children's school acknowledging their receipt of the yearly tuition should be filed under "Financial" or "School", you can apply "Financial" and "School" labels to the same email, making it appear in both categories at once.

Tags is the same thing, except instead of emails, we tag content. Articles, sermons, Torah Portions, videos, news posts - anything can be tagged! We think you'll find the system to be an enormous aid in finding whatever it is you're looking for - and you'll probably end up finding things you didn't even know existed, too. So far, we've focused our tagging efforts primarily on our archive of sermons, but we will constantly be working on tagging the rest of our content as time goes on. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Design

Not only did we decide to redo the CMS that powered the website - but we wanted to give the site a complete visual overhaul as well. As technology had progressed, certain design limitations that we had needed to take into account with the previous site were no longer as relevant.

Screen Resolutions

One such example was the screen resolution of our visitors. Three years ago, visitors using computers with resolutions of 800x600 accounted for nearly 25% of our total visitors. Thus, the previous site was designed to be viewable at screen resolutions as low as 800x600. Today, less than 7% of our visitors still use such low resolutions - and that number is dropping steadily. Therefore, our new website design has been expanded horizontally beyond what 800x600 would allow. This has given us more room to present our content in what we hope is a simple, clean manner.

Browsers

Another example of how the progression of technology has enabled us to move beyond certain limitations is in the area of web browsers. In late 2005, over 92% of our visitors were using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to view our site. This browser, which was first released as part of Windows XP on August 27th, 2001, was over 4 years old at the time of our previous website launch. In those 4+ years, there was a severe lack of real competition in the browser arena, and Microsoft basically stopped improving its browser, despite the rapid and constant innovation in web-based technologies. IE6, while still the dominant web browser in use, became rapidly outdated. Soon, more and more bugs and security vulnerabilities were discovered in the browser, and web developers - trying to build modern, standards-based websites - discovered that their sites needed drastic adjustments in order to be usable in IE6.

Since that time, and facing increasing pressure from competition by modern, standards-based browsers (such as Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Opera Software's Opera), Microsoft resumed development on its browser, and over 5 years after the previous version, Internet Explorer 7 was released for Windows XP and Vista, on October 18th, 2006. This browser, while not anywhere near perfect, was a huge improvement over IE6, and due to being bundled with Windows Vista, has become the primary browser in use on the Internet today. IE6, once in use by over 92% of our visitors, has declined to merely 22% as of this past month.

What this means for our new website is that we have decided to support IE6 only partially. If you want to view the site as it was intended to be seen, you'll need to use a modern browser (see the above paragraph for suggestions). If you are using IE6, you will still be able to use the website and view all our content, but things may look ugly or out of place.

Onward

Websites are never finished. Just like a rocket heading to space, they are launched. A tremendous amount of work is put in to get them to the launch point, but it's only after the launch that the real work begins. So take a few minutes and explore the site. If you find anything amiss, please let us know about it, and we'll do what we can to set it straight. After all, the real work is only beginning.