Peacebang complained (rightly) that sites should include contact information. I agree. Indeed, if you have a physical location like a church building, I’d want to see that address in every footer of every page on your site.
But not just the raw address. Add some formatting — known as microformats — that give the information meaning. That way software can distinguish between an organization name, address, city, state and so forth. (Microformats have more uses than this, but it is an emerging field and better to get used to something like addresses before other standards are ripe.) One of the things about Unitarian Universalists I like it their willingness to adopt new technology early and with minimal handwringing. This is the next step, and I know you can do it. Here’s an example of the UUA headquarters, applied and with the code shown. You can use the hCard creator to make your own, or use the standards to write one like you would HTML. Anyone who blogs can figure it out.
Details after the fold.
Unitarian Universalist Association
25 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108
USA(617) 742-2100
This hCard created with the hCard creator.
which is
<p class=”vcard”> <a href=”http://www.uua.org” class=”url fn org”>Unitarian Universalist Association</a></p>
<a href=”mailto:info@uua.org” class=”email”>info@uua.org</a>
<p class=”street-address”>25 Beacon Street</p>
<span class=”locality”>Boston</span>, <span class=”region”>MA</span> <span class=”postal-code”>02108</span>
<span class=”country-name”>USA</span>
<p class=”tel”>(617) 742-2100</p>
<p style=”font-size: smaller”>This <a href=”http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard”>hCard</a> created with the <a href=”http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator”>hCard creator</a>.</p>
Go and do likewise.
Interesting; thanks for sharing. I hadn’t heard anything about microformats. Is this a fairly new thing, or am I just too out of the loop? Perhaps you could write a post on the websites you read regularly that keep you up-to-date on this sort of website development information.
They’re a couple of years old. Not fully ripe, but I suspect they’ll be big in short order.