Who Moved My CofE Web Site?

Today I was updating the No Anglican Covenant Web site, mostly to add new documents from the Church of England. As I was doing so, I began getting “Internal server error” messages when trying to reach pages I had been able to view a few minutes earlier. (See image below. Click on images in this post for a larger image.)

A bit later, the Church of England Web site returned (sort of), but none of my links worked. I tried to search for the documents to which I was trying to link and, on every search, the following notice was returned:

So, what is going on here? Consider the matter of the Church of England Web site’s URL. The Web site in the past could be found at http://england.anglican.org/, http://cofe.anglican.org/, or http://churchofengland.org/. It appears that the primary domain (or subdomain) being used before today was cofe.anglican.org. As of now, trying to access that subdomain displays the “Internal server error” message. The primary domain now seems to be churchofengland.org; england.anglican.org is being redirected to churchofengland.org.

Well, the Church of England has launched a newly designed Web site. I didn’t know this was coming, but, apparently, others did. Clearly, the launch, which was done Friday night, is a disaster. One has to ask if the designer, Zebedee Creations, bothered to test the new site before going live. The Church of England should not pay for their new site until it actually works.

Is more going on, however? The Anglican Domain (i.e., anglican.org) is at least partially controlled by Americans. (Click here for more information.) Does the Church of England not want to be at all associated with Episcopalians?

Update, 1/7/2011, 6:16 PM: The subdomain cofe.anglican.org is now being redirected to churchofengland.org.

Update, 1/7/2011, 6:31 PM: Thinking Anglicans has also published an item on the new Web site. That post quotes Director of Communications for the Church of England, Peter Crumpler, as saying, “All the existing links should transfer across [to the new site] auto­matic­ally.” Yeah, right!

Update, 1/7/2011, 7:13 PM: The search function on the Church of England Web site is no longer giving error messages for every search. On the other hand, I have not found any of the documents to which I created links earlier this afternoon.