There is progress behind the scenes, and it all points to one thing… making sure that you are able to Buy The Book. We had originally developed a very lovely site using Joomla with a RocketTheme’s theme called Perihelion. We’re not a huge organization, so it took us a significant effort to develop that wonderful site – if you saw it, you’d agree. I felt like we had done a knock-up job of what we set out to do.

Then it crashed. It’s one of those things that happens sometimes. 300 books sold (a fine start, but no where near the point of it all) and we find ourselves needing to re-write the whole thing. I won’t even go into the “should have” conversation – should have backed up – shouldn’t have crashed – should have been able to rebuild easily… not worth the time. Instead, we had a quick powwow and asked ourselves what it was we wanted to see in our site. We looked through the Google Analytics data we had collected, discovered certain things and then decided that what we needed to do was just a bit differen than what we were doing.

There’s a silver lining to every cloud, I guess. We never would have gone to a blog format from our CMS format without this not-so-gentle push. In the long run, I really believe this site is going to be better than the last. It gives us a chance (see how I’m talking about the silver lining not just the dark cloud) to use what we learned and to put it to work.

So, here’s what’s up. We’ve got the site up, with a placeholder page and the ability for visitors to Buy The Book. Now I’m working on themes. We’re currently using a theme called Inuittypes. I’m working on installing a gallery tool (maybe both of wp-prettyphoto and Featured Content Gallery. Then we’ll create three or four separate sections of the site – a Stories section – giving you excerpts from the lives of the people featured in the book – a Tour section – giving you dates, details, and photos from the 2009 En-kata Tour coming to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina, and Montana this summer (yup – that’s a teaser… more details later) – and a Project section – remember that the whole point of this is the school MAPED are building for their children.

So we’re on our way and though you can’t see much yet, there is lots of work going on behind the scenes, and you can expect to see changes in the weeks ahead.

On behalf of Pamoja Ministries, Thank you for being involved in our lives, our ministry, and in the immensely good project we are making a reality together (’cause that’s what Pamoja means).