The Parish Website: An Essential Tool for Ministry
Jeff's post here on OSCatholic titled "What Makes a Good Parish Website?" brought me to brainstorm and design a PowerPoint presentation for clergy and parish staff/volunteers in the Diocese of Sacramento, to get folks moving in the right direction.
On Tuesday, June 1, 2010, I delivered this presentation to ~100 attendees at our first annual diocesan Stewardship Conference.
I recorded the audio on my Olympus WS-300M and edited it with Propaganda. Then, I broke the audio into 21 separate files to match the 21 slides of the PowerPoint presentation using Roxio Creator 2010 (this step was a necessary evil, as I discovered). Finally, I downloaded and installed a trial copy of Adobe Presenter 7 to sync each audio file to each slide's animation and to produce an online copy of the presentation in Flash.
To view the 28-minute presentation, click here or on the screenshot:
I'm hoping that this digital copy of the presentation will make its way into the offices of many diocesan and parish clergy and staff, to assist our Catholic parishes in publishing great parish websites.
Permalink to the presentation: http://www.diocese-sacramento.org/website
Download the handout that accompanies the presentation, which is essentially the presentation's text bullet points.
Comments
So I'm a developer by trade, I work mostly on web apps. I also volunteer to manage my parish web site in my copious amounts of free time (sarcasm). I don't like our parish web site. We use e-Catholic Churches and I don't like it (I'm being polite, I can't stand it). I'd love to go Drupal, but I just don't have the time to do the upgrade, re-style it, re-train everyone, etc. That's a full-time job to say the least. What is someone like me to do?
I'm not sure... maybe you could start with Wordpress—might be a little quicker to build out a rough draft of a new site, at least. Not as many distributed CMS features, though.
Advancing the faith.
We use Joomla for our parish website. It is powerful but simple enough that people who are not so tech-savvy can use it.
Chad, specifically (in bullet-point format), what do you not like?
CarsonW.com
This would be good to know—I've never used one of the eCatholicChurches-built sites, so hearing from someone who does use one would be a good thing for everyone, I think.
Advancing the faith.
I've been using their product for some time now and have really liked the interface and capabilities. Yes, there are things that I would love to be able to do (like have direct access to the CSS files), but the CMS is made for your average parish, not for web developers. I'd also love to see RSS feeds for sections of content, and that's forthcoming. With the ability to edit the source code for any page, I can embed my own functionality if need be.
CarsonW.com
I have done several web sites for organizations and the best tool I've found for an interactive, web 2.0 web site is Joomla with Jomsocial (www.josocial.com) added. Joomla is free but Jomsocial will cost only $150 for the pro version then $100 renewable each year. There are other applications that will work great with Joomla including blog, calendar, photo gallery, event management, forum, video, audio & more.
I created a parish website solution at http://www.MyParishWebsite.com for anyone who's interested.
CarsonW.com
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