How it works.....
About this web site

If you don't know where to look for something or can't find what you want, please look at Where to find things (below) for guidance.

If you're having problems using this web site, e.g. how to navigate to where you want to go next, please look at the Help (below) for guidance.

If you're interested in the way we operate this site, and want to be reassured, please look at our Policies (below) for information.

 
Where to find things in this Web Site

Welcome 'Home' page or 'Front' page.  Everything starts from here.
Who we are The first of the four core sections of the site. Describes our circuit, its churches, our people, our locality;  provides maps to help you find your way by road to any of our churches.
Our Circuit What Mow Cop, Biddulph and Congleton Methodist Circuit is, and where it is
Our People Pictures of some things our people have done
Our Churches The names of the circuit's churches positioned on a map.  More detailed maps avaailable.
Our Locality A description of the Congleton and Biddulph areas
What we do The second of the four core sections of the site.  Lists and describes the groupings, both formal and informal, of people who get together to do things in the name of Christ.  
Some Projects we do e.g. The Wellspring Kitchen and support for Leprosy and AIDS victims 
Worship Activities e.g. Gatherings for worship, Prayer Groups and Debate and Education
Outreach Activities e.g. Methodist Homes for the Aged (MHA), Women's Network, Christian Aid, Action for Children (was NCH), Traidcraft, Circuit Action Group (CAG)
Youth Activities e.g. Uniformed groups (Boys Brigade, Guides etc), Toddler-and-Carer Groups, Youth Clubs
Fellowship Activities e.g. Music Groups, physical recreation groups (badminton, walking etc), fellowship meetings
Administrative Activities e.g. managing the circuit, providing transport to church, booking rooms at the churches
Faith Matters The third of the four core sections of the site.  Covers three dimensions of faith matters:
What we believe Descriptions of Christianity and the Methodist way – what's special about Methodists and Methodism, a description of the key aspects of a Christian's faith, 'Our Calling' (responding to the gospel of God’s love in Christ through worship, learning & caring, service, evangelism)
What we do in faith How we are putting our faith into practice.  A special version of 'What we do', described above – Our actions and activities, our partnerships with other organisations for the work of faith, 'Our Calling' (see also 'What we Believe' above)
Christian Growth Helping people to get a deeper understanding of 'What we believe' – through tools and materials for individuals to Improve Our Understanding, Education Packages to tackle the same when we come together in groups, and on-line tools to perform bible searches
News & Affairs The fourth of the four core sections of the site.  A journal of what's going on both locally and more widely with relevance to the Circuit.  Material is selected to be of interest to people who are not actively involved in the activities of our Circuit and its churches as well as our members.  
News Archive Some material that has been published previously in the News & Affairs section and then retired is retained in the News Archive.  For speed of downloading, this section is split into 'pages' that can be downloaded individually.
Magazine Some items of news and affairs are less tied to a specific date and time than 'News'.  We record these in the Magazine section, sometimes after they've been in the News & Affairs section.  For speed of downloading, this section is split into 'pages' that can be downloaded individually.
Young People How the topics covered in all of the core sections above look and feel from the perspective of our young people.  Plus some topics of particular relevance to the young.  
Fellowship Groups e.g. the MATCH club at Wellspring church for young people aged 11 and upwards, the WATCH club at Wellspring church for young people aged 8-11, 'Footsteps' at Trinity for young people aged 5 years to late teens, and  'Youth' at Wellspring, for people in their teens
Uniformed Groups

e.g. Guides, Brownies, Rainbows

Boys Brigade, Juniors, Anchors, Band
Music Groups e.g. Circuit choir, Trinity operatic society, Congleton youth orchestra
Our Churches A direct/fast link to the 'Churches' part of 'Who we are' (see above).  The eighteen churches in our circuit are Biddulph, Biddulph Park, Bosley, Brookhouse Green, Brown Lees, Cloud, Congleton Edge, Davenport, Key Green, Harriseahead, Hilltop, Lask Edge, Lower Withington, Mow Cop, New Road, Rood Lane, Trinity and Wellspring.
Church News Space for any church in the circuit to publish information specific to themselves.  Amongst other things, existing church magazines may be republished here.
Preaching Plan Each quarter we publish a list of who will be preaching at each of the churches' services, and identify any special services.  This page is also accessible through the 'What we do' ('Worship' Activities) section of the site.
Contact Circuit How to contact the Circuit, for matters relating to Christianity, Methodism and the running of the Circuit and its churches.  See also 'Contact Site' below.
FAQ Frequently Asked Questions:-  Mainly questions about what people may do in Methodist churches, and how.

Also covers purely administrative matters, e.g. how to book a room (for a wide range of purposes) in one of our churches or other buildings.  (See also the Administrative Activities in What we do.)
Handy Links A collection of other web sites relevant to Circuit's activities.  The links are gathered into groups according to what kind of thing we think they are useful for.
How it works (This page)
Contact (web) site How to contact us if you want to provide materials for publication or give feedback about the current state of the web site.  See also 'Contact Circuit' above.
Don't miss this Highlighting  items well worth a look, just in case they're missed.
  

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Help with using this Web Site

Where to find what See the site map in the table above
Problems seeing our pages See our site policies.  If that does not explain your problem, please contact the website team.
'Broken' hyperlinks to external web sites We test the validity of these links when a page is published.  The reason for a 'break' may be that there is a temporary problem with accessing the external computer (server) used to send the page to your browser.  Please try again later.  If there is a persistent problem, please tell our website team.
Hyperlinks' appearance Within bodies of text, textual hyperlinks are always blue and underlined.  Where all text on a page or part of a page is clearly used for navigation, underlining and blue colouring may be omitted. 

If a hyperlink points to an external web site, you may see the page address including the likes of 'http' or 'www'.  

If the destination page is large, e.g. a PDF file, a warning message and this sign are displayed:-

If a picture is available as a hyperlink, it will commonly also have blue, underlined text associated with it.  
 
When a mouse is positioned over any hyperlink, the cursor will take the shape of a hand with a pointing finger.
Navigation Bar On every page of the site, there is also a standard navigation bar in the left-hand margin, allowing you to switch to a different section of the site.
 
If you want to go back to the 'home' page or 'front' page of the site, click on the link to the 'Welcome' page, which is at the top of the Navigation Bar.
Getting back to where you were Standard browsers offer a BACK button.  We do not normally provide additional, BACK buttons on the pages.  
 
You may also use the Navigation Bar (see above).
Reading PDF files In one or two places, a hyperlink points to materials stored in PDF (portable document format).  You will require Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these materials.  If you do not have a suitable version of Acrobat as a 'plug-in' for your browser, you can get one from  www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
 

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Policies applying to this web site

Update frequency We aim to update the topical pages of the site every month or so, e.g. Coming Events, Preaching Plan, church news.

Numerous areas of the site are fairly stable and are expected to change infrequently, e.g. Our Churches, What we do.
Protection of children We have put in place editorial control systems to ensure the content published meets our standards, e.g. so that images of children are not recognisable or interesting for the wrong reasons.  Our full Safeguarding Policy is available on request.
Protection of all citizens Personal details are usually withheld.  The main exceptions are where contact details for key Circuit office bearers are provided, or where an individual has first been consulted regarding the publication of their email address or some other personal detail.  Phone numbers, email and surface mail addresses are held in graphical form to avoid web robots being able to detect them and send spam.  Unfortunately this means that bona fide users cannot use the 'copy' facility in their browsers to pick up this information and cannot simply click an email address to create an email message automatically.
Visual impairment We have tried to use colours and colour contrasts that will not cause difficulty with colour blindness or weak eyesight. 
 
For normal text, we use point size 10. 
 
Please let us know if you have difficulties.
Hardware supported We support monitors with a resolution no less than 800x600 pixels: our pages will fit on a screen of this width without users having to pan across from side to side of a full screen browser window.  We also try to make sure the core information in our pages will fit in the vertical space available on a 800x600 screen.
 
Our web site is only validated for recent versions of Microsoft Windows platforms.  Macintosh and Unix platforms are not validated.  We validate Microsoft and Mozilla-family (e.g. Firefox, Netscape) browsers.
 
Sound and video clips are not used, therefore special hardware or software plug-ins are not required for this (and downloading of pages is faster).
Software supported We test only for support of recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla-family browse such as Firefox and Netscape.  Support for frames is required.  
 
These browsers require no active capabilities: all HTML is static: no animation, no video clips, no dynamically generated or fetched data.  
 
Our web site is only validated for versions of Microsoft Windows systems from Windows 2000 onwards.  Macintosh and Unix systems are not validated.
Fonts supported We use common, non serif fonts: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Helvetica.
Download times We try hard to make all of our page file-sizes small enough for loading in a matter of seconds by modem link, even at busy times.  There are just a few pages which are knowingly a lot bigger.  In these cases we provide warning text and this sign:-
 

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