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Church Website Best Practices - Entries from May 2009

WedWednesdayMayMay27th2009

Thank You!

Posted Wednesday, May 27 2009 @ 8 AM byTravis Hickox Tagged No tags 0 comments Add comment

"I just wanted to tell all of you how much we LOVE our website from iMinistries. I want to thank you for all of your hard work on our behalf. We pray for all of you and your ministry to churches."

Jean Povart

Director of Christian Education and Administration

Lakeland Baptist Church

WedWednesdayMayMay27th2009

Anchored

Posted Wednesday, May 27 2009 @ 8 AM byTravis Hickox Tagged Free 0 comments Add comment

Being spatially aware is important. Just like a cluttered house can make you feel nervous on the inside, a cluttered website does the exact same thing. Cramming your website with as much content as possible isn't the best thing in the world. It leaves your users frustrated. You might "appear" bigger, but if no one wants to use your website, who really cares?

This skin is simple. We created it so that you don't ever have to load a header if you don't want to, or if you don't have someone on your team that can help in this area. Don't worry though, if you do...this is still a great skin to use!

This skin also has a wider viewport (the area were all of the text and images sit) which allows you to have more content on the screen before having to scroll down the page. Another benefit to having a wider skin is that it allows you to have one or two more top level menu items. People don't like digging for stuff, so the more that you can put your big ticket items in your menu, the better.

Another nice point about this skin is that it uses our new Quick Menu feature that we developed for Harvest Bible Chapel Oakville's skin. While their Quick Menu is interactive (a button that is in the upper right hand corner of their screen pulls down their Quick Menu), this one stays statically positioned in the footer

ThuThursdayMayMay21st2009

Harvest Bible Chapel - Milwaukee South

Posted Thursday, May 21 2009 @ 8 AM byTravis Hickox Tagged Free Harvest Bible Chapel Quote 0 comments Add comment

I was working with Jen Hawkins of Harvest Bible Fellowship yesterday, and we were looking at some of our existing customers websites together. We came across Harvest Bible Chapel Milwaukee, and I must admit that when I saw it, I felt a little bit of pride.

Harvest Milwaukee has been with us for two years, and they recently decided to put some extra effort into their website. They selected one of our free skins and had their worship pastor create a header for them. They also have spent a significant amount of time filling in the gaps by using highlights on various pages as well as trying to add as many thumbnails to their articles that they have posted. Their site has been transformed in a great way.

I wrote their Senior Pastor to encourage him in what I saw, and he had this to say:

"I love your product and would recommend it to anyone. It is disappointing to see some using the product, but not to its fullest potential. We still have a long way to go with blogging and groups...but we're getting there."

Joe Martinez
Senior Pastor, Harvest Bible Chapel Milwaukee

I can not stress to you enough how simple our system is to use, you just have to spend a little, and I stress "little," time learning how the pieces work. We have a video tutorials available like this one on how to use our blog feature and many written help files which give you step-by-step instructions.

Like anything, you get out what you put in. I am very excited for Harvest Milwaukee and for their efforts.

TueTuesdayMayMay5th2009

Harvest Bible Chapel - Oakville

Posted Tuesday, May 05 2009 @ 8 AM byTravis Hickox Tagged Custom Harvest Bible Chapel 0 comments Add comment

We placed a fresh coat of paint on the site for Harvest Bible Chapel of Oakville. In this itteration, we went in a different direction than their last custom design. As their church has grown and they have placed a larger emphasis on communicating online to their church body, they have found that their website has been filled with tons of information. At times, it can be hard to find quickly find items.

After plugging their Google Analytics account number into their iMinistries website, they found that a large portion of their viewers have larger screens than what they had just over two years ago. Because of this handy information, we were able to make the viewport, or the space that you see, much wider. This has allowed them to have more menu items and more content front-and-center without having to scroll down the page.

In addition, Harvest Oakville is the first to use another feature that we just created a few weeks ago--the Quick Menu. This new feature helps users find things quickly on your website. With just a click of a button, a detailed menu slides down, listing links which jump to hard-to-find items. While you can kind of see how it looks in the screen shot provided below, we encourage you to check it out yourself by either clicking on one of the images or visiting http://www.harvestoakville.ca.

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Church Website Best Practices - Entries from May 2009

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