UCG is hands-down the most effective COG organization at using the web. They have video commentaries, video and audio sermons, Bible studies (for adults and teens), booklets, FAQs, information on the Feast of Tabernacles, periodical publications and news, and the list goes on. The trouble is, they have so much that it’s sometimes hard to find what you need.
Well, there is now an initiative to completely revamp the site “from the ground up” according to the Inside United: Realtime blog article “UCG.ORG To Be Revamped”. Instead of relying upon static pages, but much of it will be written to contain dynamic pages, providing more flexibility to the user. This will be organized by assigning appropriate keywords to all content on the site.
If you have never setup or maintained a website before, it might not be immediately obvious just how much of a change this really is.
One thing that is obvious is that one of the intents is more centrality.
The new site will give us the opportunity to bring in the blogs of our staff writers, which will also be found on the topics and tag pages. Bringing in content from all of our publications and all of our blogs means that people who read our content will no longer have to go to many different Web sites to read The Good News, World News and Prophecy, Vertical Thought, and blogs by staff writers. They will have an all-encompassing site that will streamline their user experience.
It sounds like they will continue to own the domain names that currently point to those sites and alias them to the correct portion of the main site. Apparently, Good News magazine will be one of the sites that will have a landing page to which gnmagazine.org will point to. There are obvious benefits from such a structure, and it should make it easier to find articles that way.
Assuming they finish in a timely manner, this effort should help to ensure they continue to dominate the Internet in COG-dom for some time to come.
Are you sure the "UCG is hands-down the most effective COG organization at using the web"?
Being a reader of numerous CoG webpages, Dr. Thiel and basically his one man blog claims greater success than the combined efforts of the UCG.
Here's his page with his information:
http://www.cogwriter.com/news/cog-news/ucg-reports-local-website-statistics/
Yes, I am sure. Just because Dr Thiel wants to compare his blogsite with local congregational sites does not mean that the home office is not doing a better job. Furthermore, Dr Thiel is not LCG. My comparison stands.
His does not, however, under scrutiny. His site is an unofficial blog, similar to how Mike Bennett's is an unofficial blog. That would be more fair of a comparison, as it would be apples to apples. In that case, COG Writer would naturally win out, since it has been around much, much longer.
Whenever I type in something into Google involving the Bible, UCG almost always shows up on the first 2 pages. PCG's Trumpet site does occasionally as well when it comes to geopolitics or prophecy. LCG only rarely does. It is a well-known fact that search engine ranking on the first couple of pages is paramount, and many people will not even go beyond the first page. LCG is simply just not effective at SEO.
Thiel also wrote: "While it is true that the combined Alexa rankings of UCG’s top two official websites are better than for LCG’s top two official websites, the reality is that if you include LCG’s You-Tube results (which are mainly its telecasts also being available on the internet) and COGwriter, that UCG simply is not “hands-down” more effective than LCG even on the internet to reach those without a COG background."
I disagree. UCG's video commentaries come up for me often when searching for something, while an LCG video only has ever twice in my experience. I'd like to know where Dr Thiel gets his stats for YouTube, as my experience is considerably different.
Oh, and I almost forgot to remind you that only 83% of the local sites have migrated to the new location so far. Therefore, the numbers are skewed to begin with.