Last week we implemented a wonderful new feature for pastors and youth workers on MissionAdventures.net. As you can see, we have a spiffy brand new Search Field right there on the home page:
This allows our visitors to more efficiently find outreaches that interest them. Our hope is that if youth workers can find your outreach easily and quickly, then most likely they will click through to you and request more information, sign up, recruit some kids, go on outreach and change the world forever… And to think it all started with a neat little field on our home page…
But There’s A Catch
One unanticipated benefit (see, I’m calling it a benefit, ‘cuz it will make us create new, up-to-date posts) of this new feature is that it shows excerpts of the info it finds. For example, when one searches for Mexico our site displays these results:
Okay, do you see what I see? That’s right, our search results prominently display a date… and it’s the date that the Outreach Post was created, not the date it was modified. So in this case, it looks like this Tijuana post was created back in 2010… And any reasonable youth worker may come to the conclusion that this info is out of date.
This Is Bad
It’s long been proved that out of date info on the Internets is much worse than no information. There’s a good chance that if a youth worker thinks the search results are out of date, then they won’t click through at all.
But It’s Not Horrible
There is an easy fix, however. All you have to do is create a new Outreach Post for your outreaches. And you don’t have to do it all over again. Copy and Paste will work. Here’s a recipe for you:
- First open your old outreach post as if you were going to modify it.
- Copy all the info in it, and close it by clicking the “Cancel” or “Save & Close” button.
- Create a New Outreach Post and Paste the Old info in it.
- Modify whatever you need to change and make up to date in the post and click “Save & Close
- Finally, delete the old outreach post, after of course you verify that the new one is up and working
That’s all there is to it! Now your new post will show up with a current date in the search results. Happy Outreach-Post-Creating!