a church cio

This entry is part of a series on building church websites. Check out the first post.

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This entry is part of a series on building church websites. Check out the first post.

Filed under: Design, Programming, Web Ministry, Writing | No Comments

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.

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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.

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Bubble Graphs

I can honestly say there are almost no learning techniques from Jr. High that I have carried forward through my short academic life into business. However, there is one gift that a now nameless, faceless teacher once gave me. That gift was the ability to put my thoughts on paper first, and then dork with them and refine them. She (I think it was a “she”) called them “Bubble Graphs”, but the point was to brainstorm about a topic for a speech, a paper, or an argument and document things. Then go back and do the organization and structuring of those thoughts, with a final output being an outline.

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Everywhere and nowhere, that is where. In addition to some significant life changes I hope to blog about next month, I am in the midst of a big web ministry project at the church where I work. We changed our audience focus from insiders to outsiders, and are completely redoing our site visually and architecturally.

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Truth be told, that is just another one of my catchy subject lines to make you read the post (sorry to those seeking a trustful person, ’cause I am as depraved as any blogger). I have subscribed to 37signals news alerts by email and I just got one that summarizes something I have been looking forward to considering. You can read about their description of the product in the quote and at the links below, but let me just add that I am very excited to see how this tool could be used by church plants, smaller ministries, and those of us helping out ministries with technology. Looks to be a great way of keeping track of people in a low-footprint, agile kind of way.

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We are in the middle of a new web project where I work as Web Ministry Coordinator. We are completely overhauling our site design and information architecture with the help of Chris Merritt and Nathan Smith. Of the many things we are trying to do, including creating a staff blog on the church site, rolling a News & Events page is top on our list.

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I am a big fan of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Mainly because I get to hear quippy commentary from George Will during the round table portion of the show. But they also have a section of the show called “In Memoriam” which reviews the “important” people who died that week, and displays the total number and list of soldiers names who have passed away in Iraq and Afghanistan during the week.

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This is another response to some questions proposed for my talk at NRB. Two previous posts about NRB were my Initial Reflections and What Ministries Need to Know about User-generated Content.

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