New Health Ministries Website

The Health Ministries team at Forest Lake is making good headway on a new website highlighting the various events and people in their area. The site is being developed by Shelley Veal as a standalone website rather than one that is a subsection of the current Forest Lake Church website. The platform is Wordpress 2.6 and I believe she is currently using the Organic2 theme. It’s coming along rather nicely and is going to stay as a standalone site for at least the foreseeable future. At some point it might get Drupalized into the main church website, though it isn’t obvious what the advantages of that might be at this time.

I like the idea of setting up separate websites for those ministries that have the interest and ability to run on their own. I also like using Wordpress because it is more content driven and less design driven than the standard website platform. Not that you don’t get good design out of a blog OS, but rather that the emphasis is on putting up content instead of twiddling with code and design and various backend functionalities. I find that Wordpress makes a very capable CMS by itself, so the ease of use lets someone get their feet wet on website development without too much floundering around. And since each ministry website has it’s own URL then they can be branding their own ministry at the same time.

Several new church websites will be following this same development path. I want to empower people to promote and develop their own ministry area rather than having to run everything through me or depend on me (ie, wait for me) to get something posted. If they own it, then they can take pride in it and in the process more and more people are developing their skills to share what God is doing with others.

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