بسم االه الرحمن الرحيم

As salaamu ‘alaykum

As sister Saudah mentioned in her post on our server issues, much of our site outside of the Answers service and the academy courses were completely down. Unfortunately, this happened as we were working to get a new catalog and registration system up in time for the Summer 2007 registration period.

Alhamdulillah the new course catalog and registration system is now up. There are some slight visual and functional tweaks to make over the next week to make it even easier to use, but all important pieces are working, alhamdulillah.

Today I’ll go over some of the important changes in the catalog system and follow that up in a few days with what’s new with the registration system.

Catalog Changes & New Features:

1. Color Scheme - The most obvious change is the color scheme which incorporates the yellow header that Sidi Abdul Wahid of Darqawi Designs designed for us. We have been using it in some of our print and ad campaigns for almost two years now. At the ISNA 2005 convention, Shaykh Abdullah Adhami commented that he liked this color scheme as it reminded him of aged classic texts. Once he said that, we knew we had to eventually make the switch. Insha’Allah over the next few months we will update the rest of the site to match accordingly.
2. Usability - The primary focus of the redesign was making the catalog pages more user friendly by:
1. Increasing font size and line spacing to make all text easier to read.
2. Using bigger images, buttons and subtitles to make scanning for information easier.
3. Making better use of navigation hovering effects to make clicking easier.
4. Consistent breadcrumbs at the top of all academy pages.
5. A catalog navigation system on all catalog pages that makes browsing by departments and programs easier than ever.
6. Repositioning of all information using better informational hierarchy and grouping, making sure the most important stuff is at the top and related features are all near each other.
3. More Information - We want to make sure the information you need is there when you need it so we added some of the following features:
1. Each department and program page has a brief description below the courses that describes what you can expect from each course in that department or program.
2. Related Courses section to help you find other courses that you may be interested in.
3. Course Links section on the course pages that will allow you to listen to clips, view recordings, email-a-friend, view a course brochure, and more. As a heads up, much of this is work in progress, so please pardon us while we get these up.
4. New academy information pages which will help you find out more about SunniPath and our courses such as the “Why You’ll Love Our Courses” page, a more clear Study Circle/Group rate form link, and an Orientation page where we’ll put up updated information about our upcoming orientation sessions.
4. Bells & Whistles - We also put effort into making the site visually appealing with little features such as:
1. The Apple-ish ‘wet floor’ effect on course images.
2. The pages are 100% XHTML & CSS compliant (except for a necessary IE hack or two :)) which should make updating easier as well as make reading on mobile devices easier
3. There are a few more nice features in the works but these are last on the list. Stay tuned…

We would like to thank everyone that was involved in the whole process for taking time out to give us feedback along the way.

If you have any feedback such as ideas for improvement, errors that we might have overlooked or anything else please do leave a comment and we’ll try our best to make the necessary improvement.

Jazakum Allahu khayrun,

Was salaam,

Besim