Church Website

[ColtsFan76]

We had a high schooler set up our church website a few years back. It was a pretty good one with fairly up to date info. Then he went to college. To make things simple for our church secretary, he switched everything over to Mambo and our stie looks chintzy. After complaining about (see Darko!, some complaining is good!), they finally gave me access to the site. I have been able to do somethings with it but I am limited by the freeware.

What do you guys know about your church websites? Who runs them, what host do you use, what software package do you have? Or who runs secular ones also that can give me the same info?

My pastor has given me a budget of $50 per month right now to get this thing going. I have looked into a thing called LifeWayLINK - basically it gives me a standard template, the software (which is Connect / E-Zekiel) and hosting all starting out at 24.95 a month.

What we want to include is the typical church info, plan of salvation, and list of all ministries. We want to be able to add a church calendar (found a service called MyChurchCalendar.com that costs like $5 a month). The pastor wants to be able to set up his own home page off of the service (with a different address and registration) that he can post a Blog. From there, I would be interested in adding a forum for memebrs only with some church specific info not available to the general public - like the directory and such. We want to be graphic intense - especially under our ministries, if we add the picture directory, and we want to move the monthly newsletter over and get rid of the paper trail. We will also want to get our sermons (at least audio for the time being) on to the site also. We don't have digital video capabilities at the time, and I am not sure that a VHS tape can be converted into an mpeg.

For curiosity's sake, here is our website: http://fbcgriffith.org/ . Not mush to look at, but I am trying to make it better than what we had even a wek ago.

[Skyfire]

The LDS faith has a master website, through which the websites for the individual congregations are hosted.

The master site is decent enough, although I've had to complain to the site admins about the poor lay-out in the archive section.

[chad_ghost]

looks pretty good Bri.

in the webpage design class i took the teacher said that no matter how good the site looks, if people cannot navigate it, then its crap.

so, again, good so far. just keep that in mind

of course, i would change the white background, but thats just me. maybe off-white, but white seems too bland for me. my $.01.

[ColtsFan76]

of course, i would change the white background, but thats just me. maybe off-white, but white seems too bland for me. my $.01.

Exactly my complaint. I can't seem to change the background nor the font color. At least I got the font size larger so we could read it. However, this site is the one I want to ditch and start all over. I think the info is basically what we want, but better visual design and easier navigation - with updated info!

[chad_ghost]

looks like there is a style sheet involved (.css)

im not sure how familiar you are with that kind of stuff, so im not sure what kind of suggestions to make.

if you are going to ditch the site, then no big deal. if you need any help, im here.

what i lack in php (for this board) i can usually make up in html.


also, what kind of editing software do you have?

[ColtsFan76]

looks like there is a style sheet involved (.css)

im not sure how familiar you are with that kind of stuff, so im not sure what kind of suggestions to make.

if you are going to ditch the site, then no big deal. if you need any help, im here.

what i lack in php (for this board) i can usually make up in html.


also, what kind of editing software do you have?

The software we have right now is called Mambo. It is free and supposed to be easy to update news-wise. However, design wise, not so easy.

Basically, I know html. When i was in college 10 years ago, I taught myself html from website sourcecodes and online resources. I was able to build and maintain 3 different websites from scratch with no software. But right about that time, Java started hitting so I don't know much about that. I doubt I can go in and program anything by hand anymore.

I just found the site's template and will look into that to see if I can alter background color and font.

As far as what we will probably moves towards, it looks like some form of E-Zekiel - either directly through them or as a package from Lifeway.

[ColtsFan76]

Finally, God sent some help from Oklahoma by way of Loiusville, KY. We had a new couple join about a month or so ago and he has his own daily blog. He got me headed in the right direction with our church's website and set up the entire structure. Now that he is back in school (post graduate work with ancient Sematic languages!), I have full charge of our website. We have been updating this extensively the past month and now it is finally up and running.

We still have a ways to go, but it is presentable. Here is our new church website:

http://www.fbcgriffith.org

[chad_ghost]

i meant to comment. this looks much better. the graphics are nice as is the layout. if i get a chance, ill look through it some more.