New Church Website

Josh and I have been working to put together a new website for our church. I built the old site a couple of years ago. It was built the old fashioned way - it was all hard-coded html and css. Since then I have maintained the website by hand. Each week, I have updated the content, uploading sermons, and editing pages as required. The old site can still be visited. It was a utilitarian site, with out much color or flash.

Over the past year, I have been planning a new site for the church. I have been listening to the Geeks & God Podcast. The podcast is a great resource for web design, particularly in the area of content management systems. They have introduced me to Drupal. Drupal is an open source content management system. Its role is to be serve as a go between between the internet and a database. The database contains all of the content for the website and Drupal allows it to display the correct information when someone visits the site. It also allows users to log in to the site and update content in the database.

As a result, the church has a site that should be easier to maintain, that is more colorful and is an overall improvement. Check it out: Christ Community Church - Ocala, Florida.

Tags: Christ Community Church, Drupal, Geeks and God, website

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 Church Tech

2 Comments to New Church Website

Hi John

At Internet Evangelism Day, we’ve done a self-assessment tool for church websites:
church site design
which I hope might be some encouragement to you. One little thing I would humbly suggest straight away - your postal address in the footer of all pages, to help with google local search!

Blessings

Tony