Hi from MN

[wdesign]

Hello,
I'm Lance from MN. I'm on my third web site for my church and am thrilled to have found a CMS like Joomla! to do it with. I was using phpWebSite prior to that and originally had just a straight HTML web site.
I've just put the site live in the past couple weeks. It needs some areas filled with information yet but it was beyond my previous site for usability and information so I switched.
The calendar I've integrated is Thyme from Extrasoft (http://www.extrosoft.com/). I used it with my previous site as an external calendar and was glad to find it would integrate into Joomla!
The churches web site is www.stjohnredwood.org (http://www.stjohnredwood.org) It was quite a challenge finding a way to integrate a church and school site into one usable site but I feel good about how it's going at this point.
I will be back to this forum as I have questions, especially about usability of the site. It's nice to have outsiders to critique.
Please reply or email with any ideas you may have for my site.
Till later,
Lance

[olddirtret]

Lance

Welcome to the forum. I took a look at your church's website. Very nice.

I must agree that Joomla makes web development a lot easier.

Tom

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Lance,

Thanks for joining the forum, and posting about your site.

Mostly commonly, in my experience (thousands of church websites viewed), churches with an affiliated school have a splash screen for a home page. The splash screen contains options to go to the church site, or to the school site. This is one of the few reasons to still use a splash screen. Arty splash screens have otherwise mostly gone out of style.

I don't think I've seen one church website that integrates the school and church throughout its website. (I'm sure I've seen sites in which one page or section of the whole site was devoted to the school, however.) But if you can make it work — integrating the two — go for it. But you are trying to meet the needs of two totally different audiences by doing so.

I encourage you to work on the banner. The banner should be a strong focal point of a website. The photos you are using are "long shots" and "medium shots," that is, photos taken from a distance. I encourage you to remove these long shots. Instead, include only one or two medium shots, and take or find many more close (up) shots to use in the banner. Use photos that show people from the waist up, and even close-ups of faces. Such photos have far more impact than long shots. (Long shots have their purpose, for example, to establish a setting.)

Try to integrate the logo into the banner, so that photo(s), logo, and maybe some other graphic comprise the banner.

I'm glad you have the schedule on the home page — so many churches don't include this important information on the home page. As a result, visitors have to hunt for the service times on the websites.

But, having said that, I would encourage you to not have the service times literally front and center, and in the table arrangement at that. It seems to me it would be better to have a few paragraphs of text in that space, such as a welcome from the pastor or minister. Perhaps move the service times to the bottom right, where there's a gap right now.

[StubbyD]

Hello,The calendar I've integrated is Thyme from Extrasoft (http://www.extrosoft.com/).

Hi Lance and welcome aboard.

Thanks for the calendar link as this is something I'm currently going through. Investigating, deciding, etc ... looks good atfirst glance but will need to play to see if it does what we need.

Stuart