Church IT - Supporting ministry with IT

I’m in the process of redesigning our church’s web site. Having realised that spending £10 for a proper template (thanks to JoomlaShack and their online template builder) rather than trying to do it myself and wasting a lot of time, the main work has been deciding how to organise the articles and what should be on the front page.

Church Relevance has a regular chart of well designed church web sites and this provides a useful counter balance to my desire to get as much content on the front page, often at the expense of visual eye candy. Hopefully the new homepage will do this much better than the current one.

Even so it’s hard to know what sort of information should take pride of place on the web site and this goes to the root of what the web site is for. It is an advertisement for the church to the world, but it can also provide huge benefits for existing members.

I read a great article tonight on the subject at digital.leadnet.org, ‘Does your church website serve two masters?‘. For a long time the majority of our traffic has been from new visitors. Some new traffic is good but this suggests that it’s not really a community site. I’d also love to see the site used by more people but that doesn’t seem to happen. But that’s a good reminder for me that many people do not use the web and computers like I do. So I think for the moment we should concentrate on bringing people in on the main website, and maybe set up a subdomain for all the internal stuff. 

I think I shall add have added the author’s blog, healyourchurchwebsite.com to my blogroll.

Now I need is approval and sign off….

One of the dangers of computers is trying to do more than one thing at a time. I suppose that’s always been the case but working with the email and instant messenger running, not to mention the blogroll (and the forums I’m supposed to keep an eye on), it’s hard to stay focused on any one thing. And that’s not mentioning the real people I work with, who are far more interesting and worthy of my time.

I was very interested by this article that popped up the other day (via Lifehacker if memory serves) about how to concentrate.

It got me thinking that many successful people really know how to concentrate on one thing. There’s certainly enough tips online about booking meetings with yourself to avoid interuptions.

Perhaps I shall cut down on the distractions, people know my telephone number if it’s really urgent. Curiously enough I sometimes miss the old days of essays at Uni, when I could just focus on one thing for several hours and not get distracted.

Then again, I’ve got a lot of words to write on one subject tomorrow, so I may well get the chance after all!