The Zinzendorf.com website was originally developed in 2000 as part of the Zinzendorf Jubilee, the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Count’s birth. Twenty-four years ago, the web was a very different place – websites were mostly viewed on desktop computers, we had flip phones and Blackberries, “smart phones” and tablets were in the future. The original site was hand-coded HTML, designed to display on a 640 x 480 display. All websites were designed to display in horizontal (“landscape”) mode.
We redesigned the Zinzendorf.com website in 2011 to accommodate larger displays that were common, but few people then were viewing websites on phones. The first Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab, had just been released.
Today, over 50% of website views come from mobile devices — either tablets or smart phones. These devices vary dramatically in display size, and may be desplayed either horizontally (“landscape”) or vertically (“portrait”). So we have redesigned the site using state-of-the-art tools as a responsive site which will display properly on any size of device and ny orientation. We have been able to add a lot of photos, graphics and historical art and to increase the coverage of the site.
But simple format and display changes are only part of the issue. Much of the material was written almost a quarter of a century ago, and considerable new scholarship has emerged in the interim. Scholars such as Katherine Carté Engel and Katherine Faull were just starting their careers then, and have now published a great deal of material on Moravian women. We have expanded the material that is here and have invited a number of scholars to submit new, popular-level articles, and will be adding links to academic material.