Details make me smile.  This week we are looking some small details in our new website we’re launching at Liquid.  I was reminded by Seth Godin last month that good user experience is important on our websites! I’d love your feedback as we roll out our new site!

Two of our team members, Lauren and Sim, have  led the charge on making this new website a reality over the past year.  I’m happy with how it’s turning out.  I thought I would look at some very small details from the new site and talk about what we believe these new things add to our web presence.

Good user experience is the result of many small decisions executed with excellence. Our team is doing a great job looking some some small details!

The web is social. Facebook is literally rewiring the world’s approach is relationships.  We have added two key features from the Facebook social plugins to our site to attempt to encourage people to share and interact with our content in a way that hopefully gets them to spread their Liquid experience to their friends.

A few months back I saw some stats about our 2,500 users of facebook.com/liquidchurch that shifted all this social web stuff for me. It turns out that our users have over 500,000 friends on facebook! We are just one relational connection away from half a million people.  Clearly we need to find a way to reach this audience!

Who would have thought that a simple “thumbs up” would become a ubiquitous experience online! We’ve added the “like” button to our individual message pages.  We’ve placed it right at the top of the page . . . hopefully encouraging people to make the impulse decision to provide feedback.  This subtle interaction let’s others know that someone has been here and gives the user some “qualitative” feedback quickly on the message they are about to experience.

Below the video player on the new site is a simple box where people can enter their thoughts about an individual message.  If people are logged into facebook when they come our website it pulls in their facebook photo and asks them to leave a comment.  I love that we are integrating people directly into the site just as they browse!

When people leave a comment on a message that comment is published back into their “status” stream on facebook with a link to the message that they are viewing.  This status stream will be seen by all their friends . . . hopefully encouraging them to drop by and see what all the chatter is about!

What’s your take on the social web?  How have you seen churches use Facebook, Twitter or some other social tools to encourage interaction?

On Wednesday we’re going to look at how we’re taking a huge step forward in our online forms on our website. Subscribe to the blog through email and you’ll get exclusive bonus content.