Last Monday morning Roy and I were chatting about where we watched services and he had really wanted to watch the one Revd Canon Alan Bashforth had led from the Cathedral the day before. He set me the challenge of trying to find it.
Now I am quite search engine savvy and like a challenge so I Googled and Binged, I quizzed YouTube and scoured the Diocesan Website and the Cathedral Website and….. I failed! I FAILED to find the online Sunday service.
Roy had managed to find it eventually so it did exist- it was no figment of the imagination. We think the problem was that it was not labelled or tagged with words that were likely to be used to find it.
Those of us who publish online (and I include myself in this- I am not picking on anyone!) really need to get a grasp of these relatively simple things and keep what we do updated. It was easy to watch the Easter Service. read about the Boyton Flower festival and watch a steeple jack climbing the cathedral but for the ordinary person wanting the comfort of the Sunday service from the cathedral it was nigh on impossible – they would have given up. Even the “Find a service online” on the Diocesan website did not give the link… nor incidentally to the myriad of ZOOM services from Redruth but that’s a different matter.
My other slight gripe….. is that the Diocesan YouTube page brought up 5 videos initially. One was the Easter service, one was Bishop Hugh’s sermon and no less than three were webinar things about giving.
I wonder what image we want to portray online to the casual seeker?
