NEW Church Website

I've been working on redesigning the church website, moving it to the same service that hosts my blog. There are several advantages to doing this.

1. Cost: We currently pay AT&T about $10 per month to host our website. While this isn't a great deal of money, we can have just as nice a site, maybe nicer (see #2) for free on blogger.com.
2. Design improvements: Our current site was created completely from scratch by me. I have NO experience doing this, and think I did pretty well, for an amateur. But the layouts on blogger.com have been designed by professionals, and look nicer and more professional than anything I could do on my own.
   
3. Continuity: By using the same layout and color scheme (provided by blogger.com) on the church website as I use on my blogs, there is continuity of appearance.
   
4. Cooperation/Participation: This is my favorite reason. Posting on a blog is sometimes called "pushbutton publishing" because it is so easy to do. If you can send an email you can post to a blog. That means if I want someone else to post something about a musical event coming up, a children's activity, or some other ministry event, I can either give them permission to do so, or just give them a special email address. They can send their email to that address and it would show up on our home page. This is important because I'd like to eventually give this job away. While I would continue to manage my own personal blog, I'd like to see God send us someone else who is willing to take over the rest of the church website. Doing that on blogger rather than "from scratch" makes it much easier for someone else to jump in.

I've already copied most of the content from the current site to the new site. The main thing I haven't done is move the church history. I haven't done this yet for two reasons. One, the history consists of several documents, and reproducing those and putting them on the new site will require a great deal more time than I've had to work on this so far. Most of what I've already done has been done late at night on my laptop while Terri and I watch TV together. Secondly, I'm not sure how much benefit we get from having the history on our website. Our history is precious to us, but I'm not sure it does much to offer a visitor to our site a reason to come here. I'd like to know your thoughts on that. Please comment below and let me know what you think.

When I get it completely finished, we'll assign our permanent address (fbclovejoy.org) instead of the temporary one. The temporary address is fbclovejoy.blogspot.com. Take a look and let me know what you think. You can post a comment here.