The lastest issue of NTM@work represents a milestone for our communications team. It’s one of the first issues where we were able to send two writers to the location along with a photographer. Usually, we research stories communicating with the missionaries via phone, email or other areas. It’s not always that a writer gets to go on-scene! And we have a ton of great photos to illustrate the story.
This is one story Macon Hare has been dying to tell, and you can tell by his editor’s letter.
The joy of yes is a milestone because its our first issue published since we went live with the new website earlier in May! It’s got the new look.
I spent the past couple of days pulling text out of the InDesign layout document Chris Holland and Jerry Lehman put together – resizing photos to go on the web responsively, reading the story to figure out where to best place the photos, putting in call to action links…
Then adding a few articles from the magazine’s connect section, and featuring the story on the USA homepage.
Even though each little turn seems frought with some crazy detail, like an extra story pulling the wrong description text online, ameila’s eyes roaming off the top of the webpage – what a great smile?, the Triqui people group missing their webpage, a prayer article not showing on the prayer page, and having an extra button link when it did…, and the volunteer buttons going all wacky! I am grateful that those little things were all fixable, and that I could edit the website template so we shouldn’t have those problems for the next issue! It’s important for the stories and the pages they link to to be working.
Some cool new things we were able to do for this issue: A neat “pull quote” in the article (look in the middle for a guy holding a box), a special “magazine” page with a new look along with our featured story, and pulling in related article at the bottom of the story’s page (like the article about the street sweeper, and a project link to the Bible Institute Amelia attended), and also a special menu bar for each of the stories to tie the issue together. Neat!
On the backend in the CRM, the homepage feature image is a LOT easier to publish than in our previous design, and so is the issue of the magazine.
Enough said. Mayby you’d like to check out this new issue titled “Where you come from doesn’t limit God”, and read Amelia’s inspiring story “The joy of Yes”. Here’s a shout-out to the writer, Rosie Cochran and editor, Ian Fallis. And to Debbie Burgett for her article about volunteering. We’ve got a great team! And this issue came out early too!
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