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| Homepage of The Holy See. |
The Vatican gets a lot of flak for its
website (it was playfully critiqued during a design review exercise in my first Web Design class last semester, and I hope it doesn't remain the only window into the Church's online presence for my peers). If you've spent any amount of time on the site, you know well the frustration of getting lost, or at the very least, finding an apostolic letter or encyclical in only Hungarian and Italian (personally, Latin-only is less of a problem, although it does take longer to read). It contains so many documents that I'm not sure I blame their tech people for their 'bare bones' approach. I've often joked that if I ever wanted to be employed for life, I would work my way into web development for the Holy See. But like any site, visit it often enough, and you'll get the hang of navigation. That is, if you know what you're looking for. If you don't know what an encyclical or apostolic constitution is, the current layout will not be helpful at all. This saddens me, because there is enough good reading on this site to last a lifetime, and navigation shouldn't be an obstacle.