May 16, 2009
Recent YouVersion Projects
Christianity has always been a community experience—not just personal relationship.
With that in mind, LifeChurch.tv created YouVersion a few years ago, and I have been blessed to be a part of this project almost from the start. Fast forward to now, the team recently released YouVersion 2.0. Once again, I’m proud to have played a role in its release.
In case you don’t know, YouVersion is an online Bible site that allows readers to keep a personal journal or share public content with other users of YouVersion. Not only is it a great tool for Bible Study, YouVersion facilitates the worldwide Church community.
I wanted to share a couple of parts of the project that I worked on and know about.
The Early Wireframes
With most sites, the final design that you see is very different than the designers first rough drafts. I assisted with some of these initial design comps. This was before Chris Merritt was also pulled in to really make it come together and shine!
The YouVersion Blog
One piece of the site that I labored over was the site’s blog. The main idea was to keep it clean and focused. The purpose of the blog is to announce new features and offer ideas on how to best use the site. With that in mind, we stripped away the ability to leave comments. We also didn’t see a need for complex archiving. Simplicity was the goal with the YouVersion Blog:
The Mobile YouVersion Site
If you’re carrying an iPhone or Blackberry in your pocket or purse, you can disregard this one, because you should be using the YouVersion iPhone app that’s simply entitled “Bible” or the YouVersion Blackberry app. For the rest of us, if want to access the Bible from our mobile phone, then this version is for you. LifeChurch.tv asked me to redesign the basic mobile site. It was fun to do. This stripped down version is also served up to visitors using older versions of Windows Internet Explorer (ver. 6.0 and below). Simply go to m.youversion.com, and you’ll see this:
1 response so far ↓
1 Joshua Harries // Jun 21, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Hi Andy
My name is Joshua and was recently asked to undertake a project to develop a user contributed christian community bible site as we could not find one on the web. The sites purpose was to turn “consumers” into “contributors” and allow users to form small communities to evangelise, educate and edify within.
I was excited to finally come across the site youversion.com. Just like to say great job!! Its pretty much what we were looking to do so I don’t think we will need to do it anymore. And the fact that the site is not being used to generate money through advertising or sales really excites me too.
The only thing i would like to suggest to you is to SEO the site some more. It took me quite alot of time to come across your site. If i had heard of ‘youversion’ i would have found it very quickly but i was searching for words such as ‘bible’ and ‘god’ and ‘community’ and youversion did not show up.
I work for Technical Simplicity, a company that is very experienced in the SEO industry ,and having spent just 10mins on the site can see how the SEO of the site can be improved.
I would be more then willing to help you out in this if you need any advise or someone to do it for you. And anything i would do for you would be completely free of charge. I believe in what the site is trying to achieve!
God Bless
Joshua Harries.
Talk to me, Goose