Thursday, April 22, 2010

Mashing up a church website

Most internet users are familiar with the term "mashup". Commonly used to describe the mixing are technologies to create a web application. There are lots of cool technologies and web applications out there. When I think about building a new church website, as a developer I naturally gravitate towards building it all myself. After all I am an Internet developer, I can do this and best of all I can create. That alone is reason to start. However, it's not always the most efficient way to do things.

In this new age of open source technologies, there are tons of applications out there to build upon, use as examples or even license. So what I really need to be thinking is that I want to build a website mashup up of the pieces I need.

These pieces might be:

  • An event registration system
  • A photo gallery
  • A bulletin board for Prayer Requests
  • An online Bible and Bible studies
  • An electronic invitation system
  • A blog system
  • ... many more possibilities ...

The interesting part is searching for them and then how to properly evaluate which one is best for the task. Here my journey begins; which one do I tackle first? How will I get feedback? If you are part of a big church, feedback is easy, but when you have a smaller congregation feedback is light.

Well all my summer conferences and events are coming up, so I think I will start with an event system. I read some stuff on ChurchCrunch about DoAttend and it looks sweet.

Any ideas?

Saturday, March 13, 2010

A new start and some more education

So, I vowed not to start another blog unless I had something to say. The last blog started out out fine enough, but it quickly turned into a place to just vent my frustration. While I see that as OK every now and then, no one wants to read a blog that is just about complaining.

So here starts a new one, this time with a specific purpose. I want to learn how to better reach people over the web and get them to church. I don’t see this as wanting to provide them a place to go when church is not convenient, but to let them know more of what they can get in their local assemblies. Hebrews tells us to not avoid worshipping with each other (Heb 10:25, The Message) and so we should look for opportunities to gather together in Worship & Praise.

Over the years I have been asked to help build websites and I have gladly either built or helped to build new websites for churches. Lately though, I have come to the realization that that is only the beginning and much more is left to do after the website is up and running.

So I begin a journey to find out how to build a system that brings people in the church, Some of the points I want to address are as follows:

  • An easily maintainable website. That applies to techies and non-techies: there should be no barriers to anyone wanting to participate in reaching out and no assumptions made as to how much they might have to learn to do so.
  • Open avenues of communications. This should include frequent messages from Pastors and saints in the form of forums, blogs, video and audio. A prayer board is not enough; it’s too much of a one-stop. Often people post prayer requests on multiple sites and then never come back until they need more prayer. We should keep the conversation going, much like our talk with God.
  • Use the Internet to it’s potential and capability. If 7 million people have enough time to login into Facebook to play Farmville, let’s put our message in front of them. Communicate what’s happening at church right now, not after the fact only. There’s always time to get to the church for worship.
  • Use the resources on the net to gather information. Many corporations and businesses are using tools like Google calendar and messaging to keep the flow of information easily accessible to everyone, why can’t the saints of God do the same thing.

Subscribe to this feed and help me be accountable. Feel free to prod me if you haven’t seen an update in what you feel to be a respectable amount of time. Thanks for your attention, your help and most certainly for your prayers.

--Don