InSite, May 2008

Find Your Event in Style

We know that one reason many of you visit our website is to look at our Events Calendar page, which lists all upcoming events for Answers in Genesis speakers around the world. For years, you’ve been able to browse through upcoming events or search by location, speaker, date, etc.

This is one area of our site we’ve been working on recently, adding helpful features such as an interactive Google Map, a “get directions” link, and a downloadable video promotion on each event page. Our goal is to make sure you can find events near you, get directions and other related information, and publicize the event to your friends and family.

And as always, if you have an idea for how we can improve the events page (or any other part of our site), or would just like to comment to us about the website, be sure to let us know!

Feature of the Month

Continuing our tour of the education section of our site, this month we thought we’d highlight the Book reviews listing. There, you’ll find an extensive list of both pro- and anti-creationist books that we have reviewed, commenting on strengths, weaknesses, and outright problems in some of the books. (For instance, we have links to three reviews of books by atheist Richard Dawkins.) If you’re the sort who prefers books and book reviews to articles, this section may especially be of interest to you!

What’s in Store for this Month?

In addition to our new product Answers for Life, a small group apologetics study, our Answers Bookstore is chock full of new features for the month!

The first big new feature is a subcategory listing within every bookstore category. So let’s say you visit the store looking for DVDs. In your navigation in the left menu, select “DVDs and Multimedia,” and you’ll see a submenu appear with a list of appropriate subcategories (such as children’s media, music, software, etc., in this case).

Next, in the checkout process, we’ve added a pay-by-check option for those who would prefer this method; this makes us that much more flexible to your needs. We also now have a friendly, printable receipt page that will detail your order and the total amount you saved.

Also, though it’s primarily “eye candy,” we’ve added an easy-to-use hover-over recommended resources strip at the bottom of each bookstore item. So let’s say you’re looking at The Big Argument: Does God Exist? in our online store. Scroll down to the bottom, and you’ll see a horizontal line of eight other similar or related products that we think you might also be interested in. Use your cursor to hover over one of those products and—voilà!—the product expands and a pop-up box adds relevant information. By the way, you can see a list of new products this month at the bottom of this page, and clicking on them will take you to our newly improved bookstore.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, we’ve added the HackerSafe logo to our online bookstore as promised in last month’s InSite. The HackerSafe logo represents hours upon hours of work for our web team in verifying the store’s security—and the safety of your personal and payment information. This special seal is not easy to achieve. Furthermore, it signifies that the site will be scanned daily to check for any vulnerabilities so that, in the rare event any are found, we can fix them immediately to ensure the store is completely secure.

Question of the Month

Reader M.L. from Ohio writes to ask us:

Yesterday, there was a link at the top of the web site regarding what really happened to the dinosaurs. I didn’t have time to print it out to read it. I would like to know where I can find that article.

Thanks for the great question, M.L. If you’re on our website looking for a specific resource, the first thing we recommend you do is search for it! Use key words from the title (such as “really,” “happened,” and “dinosaurs”) or words you remember from the article to hone in on exactly what you were looking for. You can also add such details as the author’s name.

In this case, a search for “what really happened to the dinosaurs” gives the article you were looking for as the first result—just click the link and there you are! But what if a search for an article doesn’t help you find what you were looking for?

The next step we recommend is to visit our Get Answers section and browse through the links to find the topic of the article you are looking for. In this case, you could visit our Get Answers: Dinosaurs page where What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs? is listed as the first article link. And even if your article is not listed on the page, you can try browsing through some similar articles that may contain a link to the article you’re looking for.

But let’s say you can’t find what you’re looking for through the search engine, and you can’t find it linked in the category page or in similar articles. What then? Don’t forget that your web browser’s history menu may include the article if you visited it recently, or that the URL of the article may still pop up if you start to type in our web address.

Stay tuned for next month’s question, or ask one of your own!

Did You Know?

Did you know that our popular resource The New Answers Book 1, which is posted on our website for free viewing, has received a total of more than 720,000 pageviews even though it has been online for less than a year? (The first chapter went up in August 2007, and we finished posting the book in February 2008.) Not surprisingly, the most popular chapter of the book is Cain’s Wife, with Doesn’t Carbon-14 Dating Disprove the Bible? coming in second and Is There Really a God? in third.

The New Answers Book is just one of a number of free books we post for free reading online. Every Thursday we add a new chapter (we’re currently publishing How Could A Loving God...? online). You can also take a look at the other free books and booklets we have posted online.

And of course, if reading online isn’t your cup of tea, you can use the print-friendly feature or, of course, you’re still welcome to visit our online store to get the book in its original format!