You know, many boat launchings come with ceremony. Such as this account
Two fryers and an attendant went into the vessel, and kneeling down prayed halfe an houre, and layd their hands on every mast, and other places of the vessel, and sprinkled her all over with holy water. Then they came out and hoysted a pendent to signify she was a man of war; then at once thrust her into the water.
Or maybe accompanied by weighty words
They that go down to the sea in ships;
That do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep
Both from Wikipedia’s Ceremonial ship launching entry.
Boat launchings are one thing. But, I don’t really know what you do, ceremonially, with the launch of a public website. I mean besides announce it on social media and coax your friends and colleagues to share and retweet! My background is mostly in back-end and systems development, not so much public websites. Not lately anyway. (Ok, sure, there were those years where I helped lead all e-commerce initiatives at a global publishing company awhile back.)
There’s Significance to Ceremony
But I do enjoy the significance attached to ceremony, and wanted our launch to mean something. Still, we managed to launch the new E-g site with little (outward) ceremony.
However, I believe it’s important that folks (the kind of folks that would find – and read – this blog post, anyway) catch a glimpse of what went into the WHY? of the new site. In fact, people that don’t read this article might be a little confused, or perhaps underwhelmed by some of what we’re featuring on our site.
I’d like to speak to one of those things here.
Our Photography of Our Folks Doing Our Thing
From the beginning, one of the driving values behind the imagery on the site was this: Our photography of our folks doing our thing. Whether it be at work, at play, at rest, or serving in the community we wanted our site to feature our folks in the real-life of life. We didn’t want models. And we didn’t want stock photography of people. We wanted the real us.
So as you’re bouncing around the new site, keep in mind: our folks are the subject of these shots; our folks took these shots, edited these shots, and did all the work behind the scenes to get them to the place where they are now. We may not make the best models or take the best shots. But it’s us, the real us. You might say we’re “shooting for authenticity.”
