Church 2.0
Our church website development’s picking up, and I’ve proposed another new look as some felt that my other design was not colourful enough. Hope this time we can get everyone’s approval and proceed without making further changes to the design.
Another thing we’re planning to have, is blogging. I think it is absolutely cool that my Vicar is going to blog. I just found Blogs4God, a Digg-like website for church blogs. However, not all the external links are working. Also there aren’t many votes for each item.
An online resource I’ve known for a while is Heal Your Church Website, which gives practical advice that can also be applied to other work. It suggests, for instance, having RSS feeds for sermons, which is a great idea. The new site will have RSS feeds covering updates to every web page. I’ve tested it and it works already.
The only thing is that the website can sound overzealous at times. For many things, I’d prefer to look at the intention and not just the outcome. For instance, if it’s a small church with no budget, and the person designing its website is a beginner at web design, don’t be so hard on their website.
As noted in my SXSW 2007 coverage of the Spirituality Online panel, there was also a Godblogcon in 2006.
I used to support eBible for its Web 2.0 features, but find that its code caused my browser to hang. Youversion looks more promising. Will try it out when it’s ready.
Any of you have other links to good Church 2.0 resources?
Update so far:
- The Digital Sanctuary
- Wiredchurches.com
- Faithable – lots of resources here
First, thanks for the links!
Second, yeah, we need more good people like you and your readers participating in blogs4God.
As for some of the broken stuff, the pligg.com people keep promising to fix’m the next release … so hang on tight!!!
Singapore?! You know my friend Tom Anderson? I got a chance to meet with him there while in Singapore enjoying some satay in the summer of ’05!
Hi Dean, thanks for the comment! While Singapore is admittedly a very small country, I don’t know your friend Tom (or should that be ‘I haven’t met him YET’?). Hope you had a great time in Singapore, especially enjoying the local food. Do let us know if you’re planning to visit Singapore again.
http://godbit.com is also a nice resource =)
Well, you should check out GodTube.com. It was featured in MSNBC news and the number of users are increasing exponentially even though it is a YouTube clone.
Hi, sounds like you’ve got a great pastor there. You probably know all this stuff but for those who are starting out there is a great resource at http://www.church123.com under church website advice. Hope that’s helpful.
We have started a directory of “Christian Web 2.0” projects over at Faithable.com. Check it out and hit “Add a site” to suggest one of the many we have not yet entered a profile for. We are also starting to interview some of the new projects.
On a 2nd note, we are also the people behind eBible.com 🙂 Let me know what exactly page was causing your browser to hang and what browser. We have been busy fixing bugs for a while now and I sure haven’t heard of anything like that since a year ago during beta (we use standard javascript libraries like prototype/scriptaculous/dojo so it could have been something updated in one of those that fixes things for you. Let me know)
Blessings,
– Mark
Thanks guys for all the additional links. Oh yes, forgot about Godtube.
Hi Mark, nice to hear from the guys behind eBible. I think I haven’t used eBible for a year or more, so probably it has been fixed. Just tried a few searches on it, and so far it hasn’t crashed my Firefox browser. Thanks for dropping by!