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….

I got a comment the other day recommending the website Audiotuts. I’ve kept an eye on it over the last few weeks and it does seem rather good. The latest post has caught my eye especially, 50 Great Lyric Writing Resources. I have to say I have a soft spot for web link lists and I’ve just finished reading God Songs by Paul Baloche that has a lot about writing songs.

Composition was never my strong point at school when I did music, so I’ve been trying to brush up on these skills. There’s plenty of stuff to keep me occupied for a while.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have probably stuck with the same Bible translation for years. In my case, my church’s choice has a lot to do with it. That and the fact that the pictures in the Good News are an excellent way of finding passages!

Those wanting some suggestions will find the Bible Version Selection Tool most helpful. The basic version offers serveral different aims from private study to public reading. The detailed options offer a lot more control, such as whether cultural references are translated.

You can view the records for each Bible too, which is a useful way of getting some background on unfamiliar translations, as I was with the Message.

This caught my eye in the Blogroll the other day. My first impressions are that Grou.ps is another DIY social networking services, not that that is in any way a bad thing. Setting up collaboration tools is not always easy and can quickly become a big distraction from the job in hand.

Registration is free and only requires an email address