It is not to much of a surprise (outside of the actual look) that Cornerstone is about to launch a new website. I had the privilege of working with Brad Ruggles, a website/graphics designer and creative developer, on the launch of this new site. Two of my three earthly passions are faith, technology, and photography, which means I was pretty much able to combine all three into one project.
This project was something that took a few months to put together, and was the collaborative effort of every staff member at Cornerstone, but it was something I have wanted to work on for many years now. Not just a new website, but a new mindset into what potential the Internet has in the Church body.
Tools like Twitter, Facebook, rss feeds, podcasts, videos, and all the things that make up the Internet today can be utilized for kingdom purposes, and done in a professional way. This isn’t a new subject for me personally (see The Church’s New Drug of Choice // Part 1, Does a Church Really Need a Website?, The Church Body and the Internet, Part 1, The Church Body and the Internet, Part 2, to name a few past posts), I have been on a quiet campaign for relavant church websites for the better part of 10-15 years.
This is (to me) what people expect out of their church today, and especially those Believers and visitors in the 19-29 age range. It is a connected world, a connected society, and they don’t want or expect to walk into a church today and see 20th century technology. We don’t need to or have to spruce up Jesus. The Salvation message has remained the same for 2,000 years, but each church in the Church body reaches different people according to its purpose, and a website is a great place to start.
I say start because a website, a well designed, relavant, media based website, is where you can start to bring people to the Church and where they can learn and connect with others that have a love for Christ. It is no longer about displaying something static that shows the worship times and directions, it is about how do we connect with each other and grow in the Body. I can’t wait for the new site to go live. I think this is exactly what Cornerstone is to me and my wife when we arrived about a year ago and I was thrilled to have some part in putting it together.
I know there are a few other Church IT people that read my blog so I will be writing some additional posts on how it went together and how to even get started. What to look out for when choosing a website design company, and what you should be able to expect from your developer. I think we chose one of the best in Ruggles but throughout the course of the project I did meet several other companies, some good, and some very bad, and hope to share that with you in the upcoming months. Hope you enjoy the new site, it should be live some time this weekend.
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I received something yesterday that I haven’t received in almost 15 years (other than from myself), from a man I respect more each day as we begin to work together. A paycheck. It was really kind of strange actually. Over the past almost 15 years, Deb and I have owned our own business and worked for ourselves, and pretty much worked when and where we needed to as the business dictated, until December 2008. As of December, I have accepted a newly created position as the IT Director at Cornerstone UMC, and started a new direction and routine for my household.
Joining the staff of a church, mission, or ministry and being able to serve, as a career, is something I have wanted to pursue from almost day one when I became a Believer. As usually is the case, my timing is not always God’s timing and some 15 years after making my commitment to Christ, the time and place have come together in Auburn at Cornerstone. I have been given the general task of “Leading People to Know and Serve Jesus, through technology” and I am so excited about the opportunity to serve, have so much to learn, and can’t wait to see what God has in store in the years to come.
Being an IT person, I have followed many other church IT people over the years, and now that I am a part of it, I would love to hear from or connect with other staff that are in the same position or fulfilling the same roles as I will be in the months to come.
Two posts in particular that really got me thinking about what this job will eventually mold into is Zac Smith, the IT Director at NewSpring Church, The Perfect Job and this post that shows a great example of the relationship between church IT, communications, and media, Relationship between IT, Communications & Media. I also appreciate the example Jason Powell (the IT Director over at Granger) has shown me as my wife and I prayed about this job and what possibilities IT has within the church. Jason has taken the leadership role within the Church IT Roudtable group (and I hope to become a more active participant).
There was a lot that went into this decision in my own household and a lot of it had to do with the unbelievable staff that is already in place. I will be changing some of the ways I present my blog, (some of the topics are now going to be more related to my postion of course) with a mix of personal, photography, and work related content, so I hope you will stick around and see what else the Lord has in store.
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WOW, that was quick super fast. Well, there is the answer to my test to see how long it would take Google to index my new site, completely new url and domain name for this blog. It took less than 6 hours. Now being in the business we are in, I totally understand that indexing it totally different than a Google pagerank or Alexa ranking (which I would expect to show no data yet) of course, but you have to admit that was pretty fast.
The total time elapse from registering the new domain name to indexing was less than 12 hours total. In fact, the cashed page that Google has is one that was taken before I added my theme to the site, and that was the first thing I did. The three screen shots posted below are taken of the indexing that Google did at 17:50 on October 2nd, 2007.
The registration information for the domain:
Domain Name: CHIPSEO.COM
Created on: 02-Oct-07
Expires on: 02-Oct-08
Last Updated on: 02-Oct-07
I would like to hear from others that may have tried this and would like to know what their results were as well. Post your comments and let me know. I will update this post later with some of the information I used to create the data.
So far there is no other search engine that I can find that has indexed this site as of this writing, Google seems to be the only one so far. Now I just need to see how long it will take to get a PR7, I am guessing a year or more (probably more), but a PR2 or PR3 would be nice in a few months time. We will see.
