Well I’ve been helping out moving the church website I used to administer over to a new design and platform. Joomla was just too capable for the parish and was putting people off. Myself included, trying to sort out both sections and categories for a relatively simple site became quite a headache.

Anyway, given the current situation a static website seemed the best plan with Dreamweaver the editor in use. I use Microsoft Expression Web myself so I sorted out the template first and then had a go at transferring it over.

To my delight it worked very well. The template file, .dwt, was opened without any comment and we got started creating pages very quickly.

Dreamweaver was pretty impressive just in some basic editing over a couple of hours, hence I considered the change. It’s a shame there’s no crossgrade path from Expression Web, £400 is just too much to make it a possible buy.

• Welcome to Adobe! You are now chatting with ‘Perkins’
• Perkins: Hello, how can I help you?
• you: hi, are there upgrades for dreamweaver from competiting products?
  specifically ms expression web?
• Perkins: I’d be glad to help you with that information.
• Perkins: Do you have any previous version of Dreamweaver?
• you: no
• you: I’m using ms expression web and would like to move to dreamweaver
• Perkins: Are you there with me in chatting?
• Perkins: As we are from Adobe Retail Sales Chat, I recommend you to
  buy Adobe Dreamweaver, which is a good competitor for all other Web
  Design products.
• Perkins: Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is a web development tool that lets
  users design, develop, and maintain websites using visual editor or by
  coding directly.
• Perkins: You can create and maintain basic websites to dynamic,
  advanced applications that support best practices and the latest web
  standards and technologies.
• Perkins: We recommend the purchase of Adobe software on our web site.
• Perkins: Because, there are many advantages of buying the software on Adobe.com
• Perkins: Most importantly, you can be sure that you’re getting
  authorized software from us.
• you: yes, but is ms expression web a qualifying upgrade / crossgrade product?
• Perkins: No, from MS Expression Web there is not upgrade path.
• Perkins: What kinds of tasks would you like the software to help you
  accomplish?

I can’t say that this makes the thought of parting with over £400 any more attractive, even after my good experiences with Dreamweaver last night.

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….

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.

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.

Registration is free and only requires an email address