The new SOLA Network website has been launched. In this conversation, SOLA’s social media manager Aaron Lee interviewed SOLA Network editor Hannah Chao about the redesign and how she hopes it will help people to discover more stories.
To celebrate our new website, we are hosting a giveaway for a $200 Herschel gift card, an engraved maple plywood verse, and SOLA swag. Enter here and find more opportunities to enter on Instagram and Twitter.
This video was recorded LIVE on Instagram. Audio available on Spotify and Podcasts via Anchor.
Editor’s Note: The following transcript has been automatically generated and lightly edited. There may still be typos and grammatical errors.
Aaron Lee: Hannah, how are you doing?
Hannah Chao: I’m doing really well. I’m super excited.
Aaron Lee: Thanks for making the time. We’re recording this on a Friday afternoon. So we’ll keep this short and sweet. But how do you feel about the new website?
Hannah Chao: It is awesome. I’m so excited when we finally launched it. It looks beautiful. I know that our team has worked really hard on it. And I really think it’s good to help facilitate our people being able to check out our website.
Aaron Lee: The URL is the same. It’s still SOLA.NETWORK. All the links seem to be working. But can you tell me why we needed a new website in the first place?
Hannah Chao: Yeah. So when we first started out in 2016, I believe that’s like, what, five years ago? Excuse me, it was very much like just the easiest site we could put together, right? We had a Squarespace. If you listen to podcasts, you’ve heard all the “sponsored by Squarespace,” which made it really easy for us to have a website.
The problem with our old website was we just didn’t have a lot of features that really made our website as easy to navigate all these behind the scene tools that some of the bigger the bigger websites, especially websites that have lots of articles have. We just didn’t have those capabilities. And so we decided as our readership got bigger, and as we have more articles, too, which made it harder to find things to navigate over to a website that could give us those options.
Aaron Lee: Can you talk about those features for a second? I know one of the big ones is our new homepage that we spent a lot of time on.
Hannah Chao: Yeah, I had no idea there were so many fonts and about those things. But yeah, our homepage is great. Before, we only had like three stories and then like a couple lists that were featured. But now we have pictures, we have five up top that are our most recent articles.
And then even our top trending and editors picks have their own little images, you can get a little peek. Plus our top five I think even have excerpts which are really useful. We add color and design.
But honestly, one of my favorite features is the fact that if you click on an author’s name, you can see the other things they’ve written. Um, not everyone has written more than one thing. But let’s say there’s an author you do like. You can click on their name to see the other things they have written. And I think that’s a really powerful tool.
Also our search feature is just so much better. I remember in the last website, sometimes depending on how I guess the website felt that day, if you even search for my name on the website, it would get zero results. Honestly what I would do was I would Google like Hannah Chao, SOLA Network, how to be a writer, and that would be better than like, our…
Aaron Lee: The actual built-in function.
Hannah Chao: Yeah, this one is so much better. So if you do like keywords or other names, things will pop up so much more easily.
Aaron Lee: I love the homepage layout. The search is definitely better. I actually searched for something yesterday. And I was just like, “Okay, great. I actually have results here that I can click on.”
I wanted to ask you what kind of work went into making this website? I know you’re not too technical. You’re the editor of the website, but maybe talk about the things that we had to think about. I know you mentioned the font. And how different fonts are better for the titles versus like the actual article. Can you kind of walk us through that for a second?
Hannah Chao: Yeah, I mean, thank goodness I did not have to do much of the work and mostly responded to emails. Our designer and Jen who took care to point on our project and our marketing and with Isaac, who is the unsung hero of our website. Isaac, who uploads articles every day. Really a true legend of his own right.
But yeah, so they did most of it. I mean, Isaac, let us know what we can or can’t do. We had a designer, who we hired to give us what are called wireframes. And they came up with the color scheme. Yeah, how things could just be user friendly.
Aaron, you and I just basically were like, Can we try this? Like this? No? Can I give you another suggestion? Yeah. But then we did do you know, I think, yeah, for example, like the font, I really wanted to find a font that was a serif font, that means that they have like, the little extra bits on the letters on like, Times New Roman is a sans serif font, because it helps people who are have a harder time reading to like, read better. But then for things that didn’t require as much reading, like author names, we could do some of these cooler sans serif fonts that were bold, and exciting and fun. So those are just some of the things we tried to consider when we made the redesign.
Aaron Lee: And I think that it was a lot of work, for sure. But I’m happy that it’s out there in the world. And hopefully it pays off. What are your hopes and dreams and wishes for the new website? And how can people be using it?
Hannah Chao: Yeah, so I hope that this website makes it just more fun for people to browse around and find new stories. Like my husband’s not a word person; he’s very much a visual person. So if you’re a visual person, it can be hard to kind of see something that’s interesting.
But I think now, since we have more photos, you can find more stories that might jump out at you. I also hope that with the way that it’s easier to find stories and authors, you can get into more of our archives, which we have so much great content from these past years. And, yeah, we do have some current event things, which might not be as relevant, but there’s tons of devos, testimonies, thoughts on everything from marriage to infertility to race in the church, and what it means to be an Asian American Christian. All these things are going to be relevant for years to come. And so I hope that it’s a place where people can explore and just find resources that are a little more specific catered from and for Asian American Christians.
Aaron Lee: Yeah, absolutely. I try to dive into the archives and sometimes share a throwback article. But also, even for your Editor’s Picks and even for our Top Trending, sometimes something will appear from the archives that might be super relevant, or maybe for whatever reason really just kind of surfaces to the top. So Hannah, I’m really excited for the website. Thanks for putting in the hard work and for continuing what we do at SOLA Network.
Hannah Chao: Great. Yeah. It’s really been a fun ride. And if people have any suggestions and what we can do for version two you can email us a comment. And yeah, if you see this, we’d love for you to share maybe either the homepage or just an article that you’ve liked that you’ve been blessed by and we know that that’ll bless others.
Aaron Lee: For sure. Yeah. To our audience: Thank you so much for reading and for continuing to support us. Hannah. I’ll have to talk to you soon. But it’s good to see you and hopefully you have a great weekend.
Hannah Chao: You too.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
For more resources, here are our Top Trending and Editor’s Picks for the week we launched our new website:
Top Trending:
- Daniel K. Eng: Five Things We Are Teaching Our Kids for this Messy World
- Kevin Yi: Addressing Deconstruction in the Church: An Interview with Barnabas Piper and Jason Min
- Aaron Lee: Paul and Silas in Prison! 3 Ways to Worship and Witness in a Worst-Case Scenario
Editor’s Picks:
- Yeng Moua: Is God Good? A Reflection on Afghanistan from a Hmong Brother
- Faith Chang: Pay Attention: The Trees Are Singing
- Sarah Kang: 5 Ways To Support Your Musician Friends