Welcome to the New Spectrum Website!
For the first time in more than a decade, the Spectrum website has been completely updated.
We started from the ground up, moving to the WordPress content management system. This gives us more capability to tell in-depth stories and the flexibility to respond to the latest news as it happens.
You’ll still find a lot that’s familiar. We’ll continue publishing the same independent journalism, scholarship, and creative work by and about the Seventh-day Adventist community as we always have. But there are also new features we’re excited to put to use.
The Current
One of those features is what we’re calling The Current. It started with us looking back at the history of Spectrum’s online presence. Some of you will remember the Spectrum blog. Although it was not Spectrum’s first website, it quickly became the hub of conversation for the Spectrum community. As online publishing became a bigger part of the organization’s mission, more than a decade ago, the blog and main website eventually merged into a Drupal-powered site that we’ve been on since.
The Current is our attempt to bring back a little of that old blogging spirit. It is a live feed where the Spectrum team can share the things we’re reading and watching across the internet and social media. It will be brief, snackable Adventist-focused–but not exclusive–content we aggregate together. In our present reality of splintered platforms and siloed information, it will be a central place where you can see the content that we find important, funny, or inspiring. When we look at our traffic numbers, we’re fortunate to have so many of you who regularly come directly to the Spectrum homepage. Our goal with The Current is to make it even more worthwhile to visit our site as often as you want. The Current lives below the headline articles on the homepage, but you can also access it at a separate landing page.
And if content from The Current is not your thing? Feel free to scroll on to the lower section of the homepage, where you can see more of our full articles. You can also click on “Latest” at the top of the homepage (or top of the menu bar on mobile) to see just the newest articles.
Spectrum is fortunate to have a large library of past content–over 11,000 online articles and issues of the journal going back to the organization’s founding in 1969. At launch, we have a new archive page with filters to help browse different types of articles. Right now, it just has the online archive, but eventually, we will also be adding all the past journal content, videos from Adventist Forum and Sabbath school Zoom sessions, great sermons and lectures, and more. As part of phase two, we will also be uploading over three decades of audio from the famous San Diego Adventist Forum recordings. A special thank you to the SDAF board and especially Dr. Gordon Rick for his support for this new website and specifically for this important archival project.
This site also has a fresh look and feel, highlighted by new typefaces and a new color palette. For headlines, we have the versatile and easy-to-read Proxima Nova sans serif. For body text, we have Valkyrie, a serif typeface designed to read well on both displays and paper.
There is so much more we’re excited to do over the coming weeks and months. On the backend, we have a much greater ability to build immersive long-form stories and integrate graphics. Comments will still live at conversation.spectrummagazine.org, though it is going to take a few days before comment threads for new articles will be fully functional. If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, send us a note at contact@spectrummagazine.org.
