Lutheran Forum Launches!

Sarah Wilson is the editor of Lutheran Forum, an independent theological quarterly for clergy and laity in the Lutheran church that has for almost 100 years pursued and pondered American Lutheran church unity, while commenting on and critiquing the state of the church. LF is unique in that it has departments in every issue rather than a theme for all the articles in a single issue, making for a more exciting read! Every issue has Old and New Testament exegesis, a case study from American Lutheran history, reflections on worship practice, a seminary student's perspective, fresh studies in the theology of Martin Luther, and an ecumenical essay by a non-Lutheran towards broader Christian unity, along with new hymns, poems, and original artwork by Lutheran artists. LF boasts a readership of 2600 and growing!

View the Lutheran Forum!

What problem / opportunity were you trying to solve?

LF had the same problem that many theological journals do these days - its readership was both aging and shrinking. The board decided it was time to bring on a couple of very young editors (both 31!) to attract younger readers. Needless to say, our first request was: we need a website! The umbrella organization for LF had its own website, but it was off-putting to style-sensitive Gen Xers like us. Yet we also knew that we needed a website that wouldn't scare off the long-term older generation of readers. Not an easy task to pull off!

How has the site reached both generations? Have you benefited in other ways you hadn't anticipated?

After lots of great discussions with the Jazkarta people, they came up with a fantastic design, very sleek and stylish, yet perfectly easy to navigate. Although I'm of the web generation myself, it drives me crazy when I come across web pages that make you search all around the edges through tiny fonts to find what you want. You don't have to do that on the LF site--it's unbelievably easy to navigate.

What features do you like most? How do you like working with Plone?

Jazkarta came up with exactly what I wanted, something stylish enough to impress the web-savvy but easy enough to invite the web-fearful. I pretty much gave them a carte blanche to figure things out. The designer actually did research to figure out what kind of visuals would match our content, as well as creating different themes to match the colors of the liturgical seasons.

I suggested we do this website without the slightest bit of web experience. Zero! Never seen a speck of html in my life. I'm amazed how easy it was to figure it out. Plone is definitely good for the web-ignorant like me.

How did you hear about Jazkarta?

My husband, who does the layout for the print version of LF, went to college with Nate Aune, the founder of Jazkarta. We looked around at other options and found their pricing to be competitive.

What are your impressions working with Jazkarta?

One of the things that impressed me most was that the Jazkarta people made a point of understanding the purpose of our website and the type of content we'd have before designing the features. The website isn't just a kit-built thing plopped into cyberspace, but really adapted to match what we wanted to do. The features are easy and work great and seem to be pretty easy to add to.

Super nice people! Polite, helpful, humorous, and genuinely excited about the project. It was nice not to feel like "small potatoes" even though we are in the grand scheme of things!

It seems like we got an awful lot for our investment--everyone I've talked to is amazed we got what we did at the price we did. The extras I'd like to add don't seem to be very expensive either, and certainly worth the increased visibility we'll have.