On June 16, 2004, the New Zealand/Pacific Islands area launched an English site for all the countries in the area.
On August 4, 2008 they lauched a site in French specifically for Tahiti.
The Church has 64 country sites with 8 more under construction. You can see a list of all the Church country sites at www.lds.org/countries.
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I have a question on this topic that maybe you can help answer. What kind of oversight/management from Salt Lake City is there on country websites?
I ask because Thailand’s country website is really terrible. Useless, really. I imagine it’s been assigned to a local church employee with little web knowledge who has too much else on their plate to give it any effort. Just curious how that situation might get rectified.
I’ve sent feedback already. So if it’s entirely local with no oversight, I guess that’s the extent of what I can do. I was just hoping that someone else might get involved who could see things get done. My pipe dream is electronic texts of Thai language church materials on the website. It seems so far-fetched at the moment…
I’m happy to see the church’s stable of country sites growing, but am completely at a loss to see yet another LDS web site feature a lily-white family. LDS.org discovered people of color a decade ago … certainly someone has a photo of a lovely Pacific Islander family they could use?
In answer to both the comments above, each of the country sites is under the direction of the local Area Presidencies, who find local people who volunteer their time and talents to create and maintain the Web sites. Therefore, sometimes the quality isn’t the same as the sites created at headquarters using paid professionals.
Perhaps a word from the top about finding culturally appropriate imagery would be helpful in inspiring site admins to take their point-and-shoot out for some real local flavor.
: )
On a side note … that really surprises me — that these sites are locally administered (especially given the Church’s penchant for centralization). Are there plans to create the tools necessary for localizing sites?
Actually, the Church is decentralizing many functions to Area Presidencies. As the Church grows more and more, they recognize that more decisions need to be made at the local level.
About the photos, I think they are just using the stock photos that were part of the original templates, and haven’t taken the time to replace them with photos of island people. I assume that will happen over time.