The new job in Florida has been my only non-family focus since arriving here 8 months ago, and it has been an embarrassingly absurd length of time since I have contributed anything to the church technology world. Hoping to get back in the swing of things with blogging and share with everyone some of the stuff we have worked on since my arrival. Won’t be long now, so check back in the next two weeks while I develop a discipline of giving back. While this is way cooler than anything we have done, and the ministry impact is next to nothing, but here is some sweet action to get your mind racing with your own Macbook [Pro] mod:
David Drinnon was kind enough to reference a comment I left on his site in a fine post this morning on building site maps and information architecture. In it he even calls me a friend!
LifeFaithFusion.com finally launches this weekend to an audience of 10,000+ folks associated with the ministry of Casas Church and Roger Barrier. My favorite UI designer, Christ Merritt of Pixelight Creative, did the design for me last winter. Some projects take much longer and many more hours than ever anticipated, and this is one of those projects that seemed to never want to end. Unfortunately, I brought a friend named Brian Slezak (of the Web Empowered Church and Church of the Resurrection) down this rocky road with me and I will forever be indebted for his service and amazing grace. In spite of it being a painful project, I am pleased with the functionality of the site and the overall result. The client controls all the content management on this site (which uses Typo3) and created all of the in-page graphics themselves, so Chris and I can’t take credit for any of that. They also completely control the sidebars.
Stuart was kind enough to post a comment asking for helpful hints for building a web site as a lay person. My comment grew larger than the comment window, so I decided to just post this in case it is helpful for small churches using an all lay person team to build their a website.
When our church decided to launch the 3.0 version of our site, we knew it would be a serious effort. As “the web guy”, my charge was to be the glue that holds the pieces of the project together. There are numerous how-tos available for churches who are just getting started with their sites. My hope in this series on how to build a church web site is to share our story in a way that could help someone who already has experience in building sites and could learn from our approach.
I may say more about the recent redesign of Stonebriar Community Church in the coming days, but I wanted to let everyone know the site is live now. Nathan Smith has a little write-up on it. Already some good feedback on how we can improve things. If you find problems, there is a link in the lower-left corner labeled “Problems with the site?”. Click it. Use it. I am taking off for a few days to rest, but afterward may write more about my involvement as the PM and IA guy. I learned a lot from Nathan, Chris, and David.