Introducing Revolution Two
October 29, 2008 by Bill Robbins
As you may have noticed, I don’t charge a fee for my themes. Initially I had planned to do just that, but I changed my mind after Brian Gardner announced he would be offering a new set of themes under a GPL open source license. I learned about designing WordPress sites from Brian’s original Revolution themes, which incidentally, I had to pay quite a bit for.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that this was not keeping with the free, open source spirit of WordPress. This wonderful blog and content management system is offered free of charge, no strings attached to anyone who wants to use it. Not only that is regularly updated and improved. WordPress is not the only CMS of this type that is free, but the only ones that rival it’s quality are not free.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to offer my themes for free and only charge if people require my expertise in customizing a theme, for hosting or having something custom created. It keeps me in line with the broader community of WordPress and that is important for the continued growth and development of that community.
Go by and visit Revolution 2. If you like any of those themes, I’d be glad to help you with any customization or support you might need to use them or any of the themes I’ve created here.
iPhone WordPress Theme
October 23, 2008 by Bill Robbins
Anyone who is running a website these days needs to be aware that lots of people will be viewing your site from devices other than a desktop computer. Most people (myself included) that own an iPhone talk about how it changes your life. Once upon a time I took my laptop into the backyard to do a bit of work while my kids played. Now I usually just grab my iPhone and I can accomplish pretty much the same amount of work that way. People are using iPhones, iPod Touches, Blackberry’s, Windows Mobile and other devices to see our sites, so we need to ask ourselves “how do our sites look and function on these devices?”
I love the look of Flash, because it can do so many great animations and user interfaces, but it doesn’t work on the mobile browser on my iPhone. Most of the time this limitation doesn’t bother me–it’s often just filler. But lots of sites out there use flash for navigation. I’m leading the children’s ministry at a new church plant and we use a curriclulumn from a company called Kidmo. We are so pleased with the quality of their materials, but their site uses a lot of Flash, so I can’t use it on my phone.
To help all of us with WordPress based sites out, Dale and Duane from BraveNewCode.com have created a plugin for WordPress that uses a different theme when the site is viewed from a mobile browser. This theme has your site name at the top with a pulldown menu of your pages on the right. A search feature is also clearly marked at the top of the page. Then comes a list of your most recent posts. If you have an iPhone or a touch you can see an example of this by looking at my site.
One reason why mobile browsers are so important for churches is helping potential visitors out. If someone has a hard time finding your church and they have one of these devices they will likely use it for help. If they can’t use your site or find the information they need because of poor formatting, they might not visit.
It may seem obvious, but most of us don’t make websites that only we will look at. We make ones that we hope will benefit others in some way. This plugin is easy to use and helps people better access your content. What else do you need? So head over to BraveNewCode.com and download it today.
Why Good Communication is Necessary
October 16, 2008 by Bill Robbins
As some of you know, my family and I are helping to plant a new church in Birmingham, AL. We were preparing for a publicity blitz this coming Sunday afternoon and as part of that I had some door hangers printed up. I used a company that greatly emphasizes their 48 hour turn around time so that I could have the hangers by Friday afternoon with only 2 day air shipping. I placed the order on their website, uploaded the pdf’s with no trouble and went on my merry way. The site is well designed and functional so ordering was no problem.
Well the hangers did not ship on Wednesday as their 48 hour guarantee told me they would. So I opened a support ticket for some help. I promptly received a call saying they were closed on Monday and that delayed printing a day. As a result I would need to pay an additional $57 to receive the hangers on time.
The problem is no where on their front page, or any of their order pages did the site say they were closed on Monday, the day I ordered the door hangers. I went through their site and the only place it mentions it is on their contact page. In effect they won’t tell you when they are closed until you have a problem with something.
This brings up the importance of anticipation and good communication. We all need to anticipate what kind of information visitors to our websites will need and provide it to them in an upfront and clear way. Churches should provide clear links for people to find directions, service times and ideally at least a page dedicated to helping them understand what to expect when they come to your church.
My 48 Hour experience reiterates the need to think through our communication plan clearly from the point of view of a guest. Otherwise they may have a regrettable experience at your church that could have been prevented with a bit more forethought.
Write me a comment below with some good examples of church website communication and any bad ones you can think of.
Preview Mountain View Church Theme
October 16, 2008 by Bill Robbins
I’m are excited to give you a preview of our next theme release “Mountain View Church.” This theme has a modern appearance with dedicated “hanging buttons” to frequently used areas–podcasting, directions, service times, and a guest area. The picture on the right can be switched out. It would be a good place to have your church’s current message series.
The top features the main navigation for the site as well as a search box. Below the main images is an announcement fader that will run current announcements that can be clicked on.
This site is unique and hopefully will be of benefit to many churches out there. My plan is to offer it for free as soon as I have all the code worked out. Check back around the end of October to see if it is available for download.
As always we offer customization of our themes to make sure you get exactly what you are looking for. To learn more click here.
Thanks We Love WP
October 11, 2008 by Bill Robbins
I’d like give a big thank you to “We Love WP” for featuring our new “Organized Themes” site today. We have only been open a short time, so it’s great to get noticed and have some recognition. I’ve been following the sites featured by “We Love WP” for a while now to get inspiration and see what all is possible with WordPress. It’s humbling to be part of this great resource. Thanks again.
Plugins to Help Your Church Website
October 10, 2008 by Bill Robbins
While WordPress is a great platform to run your website, it doesn’t have all of the features you probably want in a modern church website. It’s nice to know you can expand the functionality with some of the 3,000 or so plugins that wordpress.org offers. The question is which ones can help you out of all of those.
To make your website the best it can I’ve put together a list of the most useful WordPress plugins for churches. I’m certain that there are many others that could make the list, but these make a great starting place.
Podcasting: We have been using the PodPress plugin for some time and have been generally pleased with it. What you want to provide in Podcasting is a way for people to subscribe to your messages in iTunes, but still be able to download them individually without using iTunes. PodPress does this well, plus it lets people listen to the message inside of the post without saving it to their computer. You can download PodPress here as well as learn more about it.
Contact Form: There are numerous contact forms for WordPress available out there. I like cformsII quite a bit for several reasons. It allows you to have multiple forms which is especially handy if you need several sign ups for events or contacts or some other purpose. Plus it comes with several built in styles that can be adapted to fit the feel of your website. It allows you to specify what information you collect and whether responses are required or not. You can put initial information into the form that gets cleared out when someone clicks on it. It is very professional in appearance. You can download here.
Content Gallery: Most churches have lots of information that they are trying to communicate. Add to that the relatively small space that makes up the front of any church website and you have a disaster waiting to happen. A great way to get around this is with some sort of content rotator. Lots of these are available for use with Flash. Flash looks great, but it tends to be slow and is often inaccessible. If someone views your site on an iPhone, the content stored in Flash might as well not be there. Content Gallery is a slick plugin for WordPress that uses a technology called javascript to create an image rotator that links to specific posts on your site. It’s easy to set up and the effect is great. I use it on the front of www.organizedthemes.com to highlight themes and services we offer. Some of my clients use it to showcase upcoming messages as well as large church-wide announcements. You can learn more about Content Gallery and download it here.
Newsletters: Many churches like to send out regular newsletters to keep their congregations up to date with what is happening at the church. There is a fantastic plugin called MailPress that allows you to use WordPress to run your email campaigns. This is a full featured plugin that allows you to send emails to all users, or just a select number of them. It also allows you to style the email to look like your website to keep your style consistent. We’ll go into more depth soon about what the ins and outs of a good email campaign. You can learn more about MailPress and download it here.
Calendar: What church doesn’t have some calendar of upcoming events? Even if it’s just the weekly services, something is planned just about all the time. One of the best ways a church website can help out a congregation is through the use of an online calendar. WordPress does have a variety of plugins that can help you in this regard, most of them do have their limitations. Right now we are setting people up with WPListCal by Jonathan Kern. You can find out more about the plugin and download it here. This plugin will allow you to keep an online calendar of upcoming events. It doesn’t set recurring events, so it’s better suited special or one time meetings than weekly gatherings. One thing this plugin does well is produce a list of upcoming events that you can easily feature on your homepage or in your sidebar.
WordPress is a fantastic tool to manage your website’s content. I hope that with these plugins it will be even more useful to your church or ministry than it is now. Part of its great flexibility is its ability to adapt and stretch through the use of great plugins and themes. Here at www.organizedthemes.com we are committed to helping you make the best use of all these tools.
To make sure you stay on top of all the developments in WordPress and the web that affect your church’s website, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed here.
Church Plant Special
October 9, 2008 by Bill Robbins
Church planting is very close to my heart. My wife and I are overseeing the children’s ministry in a church that is having its grand opening on November 2. Before we joined the launch team at A2 Church here in Birmingham, Al we were diligently praying and preparing to plant a church too.
I understand how much is required in planting a church. There are relationships to form, money to raise, leaders to recruit, vision to cast, equipment to buy, space to rent, and the list goes on and on. One thing every church and especially every church plant needs is a website. There are lots of wonderful solutions out there like Church Plant Media and Clover, but often times these sites are just more money than what a church plant has to spend on a website.
To help make things a bit easier we are offering a package exclusively to church plants. It includes the following:
- Creation of a custom church website to fit your style and purpose.
- Development of a home page and two interior page styles.
- Installation of WordPress and the customized theme on our server.
- Registration of the domain name of your choice (based on availability).
- Hosting and support for one year.
- Podcasting, newsletters, RSS feeds, online calendar, and more.
Basically I’m offering you a custom website for only $250. With WordPress as your content management system (CMS) you will be able to update all of the content on your site. Anyone who can operate Microsoft Word is capable of using WordPress. Imagine getting the style you want, the ability to update it yourself, and saving a ton of money in the process. That’s not to shabby.
I’m offering this fantastic deal as a way to help church planters out. You have enough to do in making your God given dream a reality, let me help you out with your site. Just fill out the form below and I’ll contact you about what your needs are and see what I can do to help.
cforms contact form by delicious:days
What is the purpose of a church website?
October 8, 2008 by Bill Robbins
It really is remarkable just how much the Internet has changed our culture and our lives. Just yesterday I found myself blocked in by a broken down freight train with no idea of how to get past. If this had happened in April I’d probably still be stuck there. But now I pulled out my iPhone and used Google maps to find a way around.
We rarely go anywhere or do anything without first checking the net. Why should we expect it to be any different when people are looking for a church?
Most people, especially those under 40, are going to make your church website the first spot they check out first when they consider your church. They are going to need directions and service times, but they are going to want to know who your church is and what you are all about. This gets communicated through the language you choose to express yourself as well as the layout, colors and graphics you choose. All of these together should reflect what your church’s vision and purpose is.
So one of the main purposes of a church website is to inform potential visitors about your church.
A second major purpose is to provide an information hub for your congregation. Church websites that are consistently updated are a great resource for their congregations. I say frequently updated because all too often churches have a site that is set up for them, but there is no way for the staff to update them. So this site that was incredible the week it was launched seems out of touch two months later and is really an embarrassment at the six months mark. How often does a church have an online registration for an event that has passed still on prominent display on their front page?
If they don’t have a web programmer on staff who could blame them?
But now any church can have a website that they can easily maintain using WordPress and one of the themes we offer here, or by adapting some of the literally thousands of other themes that are out there.
It’s not enough to have a website, or even one that looks good. It has to be updated both for potential guests and your congregation. Check back to www.organizedthemes.com or subscribe to our RSS feed as we get into the nuts and bolts of everything it takes to run a top notch church website.
Modern Church Theme
October 8, 2008 by Bill Robbins
Many churches just want a simple web presence where they can showcase the current message series as well as let members know what is happening. To help fill that need, I have created the “Modern Church Theme.” It is a simple and clean design, but still could be used to house a great deal of content.
The main page it features a prominent spot for this week’s current message, or the current series. Below that there is a three part section to feature current announcements, recent podcasts, and entries from a blog. Any of this can be adapted to feature any post category you want.
For the inside pages, the header is smaller without the current message showing. I choose a simple one column layout, and by making it wide, you have lots of room available for pictures or graphics to go with your text. Being one column doesn’t mean the sidebar is missing, it is simply placed below the main content, above the footer. There is a spot on the left hand side where a brief message from the church can be placed. On the right is an area for widgets. Use the widgets section of the design panel in your WordPress dashboard to add anything you would like to go there.
You can see a demo of “Modern Church” here.
I am providing this theme free of charge to help churches all of the world be able to have a website that they can update and maintain themselves. If you do download this theme and use it, please leave a link in the comment area below.
Like all of my themes, this one is highly customizable. I would be glad to help you out. Just click here to learn more about customization.
This theme is presented to you with valid XHTML and CSS. This is important because by being standards compliant, your website should work for years to come across all major browsers.
Cross Gate Church Theme
October 7, 2008 by Bill Robbins
Organized Themes is proud to release our second free theme for churches–Cross Gate Church. We designed Cross Gate from the ground up to be simple, but scaleable so that even large congregations could make use of all it has to offer.
Out of the box, this theme features
- An announcement rotator for your biggest news.
- Three dedicated buttons for potential visitors to your church below the announcement rotator.
- A what’s happening section that displays your three next calendar events, or entries from your church blog.
- A podcasting section that will display your last three podcast entries (you will need to add one of the podcast plugins available for free at www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins
- Clean modern design.
It’s hard to believe you get all of this for free. You can customize Cross Gate if you know a bit about CSS. If you don’t we would be glad to help you. This design can be pushed and pulled until it becomes pretty much whatever you’re looking for.
You can view a demo of Cross Gate here.
Please consider donating some money if you have found this theme helpful. It will help me to be able to do more development on my current themes and the future ones I have planned.
If you download this theme, please leave me a comment about what you think of it along with the url of the site that you are using it on. Thanks.