UKGospel.com version 3: We’re Live!

After about 5 or 6 years of:

Starting and stopping
Copying and pasting
Writing and editing
Doubting and being confident
HTMLing and Adobe Flashing

Today, the BRAND NEW UKGospel.com version 3 website is LIVE!!!! YAAAAAAAY!!!

So, what next..?

Well, the UKGospel.com project has been going for almost 2 decades. As you can imagine so many things have changed in that space of time:

We’ve gone from static HTML pages to community forums embedded in websites
Forum conversations migrated from the websites to social networking (RIP MySpace)
Then everything again morphed into what they called Web 2.0,
All of a sudden not only could we read about the UK Gospel music scene, we could actually watch and listen to the music we were all getting excited about
I went CRAZY on Soundclick and did over ONE HUNDRED mixes to promote singles, EPs and albums on the store, UKGShop (RIP).
The mixes are still there – have a listen

The Beginning of the End – Flash

In 2010 Steve Jobs wrote his infamous Thoughts on Flash open letter, spelling the beginning of end for the technology that had allowed people like me with no HTML programming knowledge to design websites.

The two early versions of UKGospel.com, version 1 and 1.5 (don’t ask) had been designed in Moonfruit – it’s drag and drop interface was perfect for visual designers like me

While it’s taken the better part of 10 years for Flash to fully die (Adobe announced in 2017 that it will stop supporting Flash by 2020, and Google’s Chrome browser officially stopped supporting it on January 2021), I still have so many great stories in Moonfruit that I’ll be transferring over here.

UKGospel Legacy project

These stories will be imported here under a series I started a few months back over on the UKGospel social feeds on Twitter and Instagram, called #UKGospelLegacy (links: Twitter and Instagram UKGospel legacy feeds)
The first of these is already live: my interview with Muyiwa about being the only non-US artist on BET’s flagship ‘Celebration of Gospel’ series.
Also coming up in the next two weeks will be stories from the Kingdom Choir‘s Karen Gibson and Mr Damention.
I have no idea how many of these stories, features and interviews there are in the earlier UKGospel.com versions, but there are a LOT.

A New Dawn

The scene has had an incredible run over the last 5-6 years: recording technology has never been cheaper, release cycles have never been more frequent, the diversity has never been this varied or vibrant.
There’s still so much to say, but this was supposed to be a very short post on the UKGospel Instagram feed that’s somehow ended up being a stream of consciousness piece
I’ll end by saying this: it’s a sparkling new dawn for UKGospel.com, but there’s even more good news: there are more platforms than ever before supporting this incredible, diverse, pulsating, creative and passionate scene. I list some of them in another post (see below)

Rebrand Journey

I’ll be using this series to share the journey: everything from transferring some of those classic stories from the scene to the evolution of the UKGospel.com visual identity (I suppose you can call it a rebrand)

Video

We’re living in the age of video so keep an eye out for the occasional behind-the-scenes video update (like this one)

So much more to say, but I’d better stop now. I still have to write this ‘Ladies of UKGospel’ post and I have less than 6 hours to do it – and I haven’t even started it yet!