solo for now

[kwilkens]

I just completed a redesign of our church website after a year of waiting semi-patiently to get the prior webmaster volunteer comfortable with the idea of letting go of the prior design (we have also recently adopted a new mission statement, so the timing has actually worked out right).

I have had pretty good luck identifying content owners and getting them to actually give me content, but I would very much like to have a cyber ministry team to help with updates and to continue to evolve our presence on the web. I haven't had much luck in getting folks on board. I'd appreciate any insights anyone has about building such a team of unpaid servants.

Kim

[iamcam]

There's no doubt that building a team is hard. For us, the hardest has been getting people who know HTML/CSS or PHP, or who are willing to work on design with us. Content, on the other hand, hasn't been too difficult.

We've been pushing for more content authors over the last few months by having a table out in the foyer, and placing features on the fron page of the site, asking for people who'd be willing to try it out. I think it's also important to be clear on what kind of content you are looking for. It may or may not help to let the people realize that they aren't committing to something huge, just enough time to produce a few pieces, and if they like, they can commit longer.

Scheduling content is also an important factor in putting people at ease about submitting. Some may be hesitant because they're unsure whether or not they can come up with something new every week, in which case, we ask them to write/produce a few as they are ready and we can delay publishing several weeks to give them a comfortable buffer.

[camainc]

I'm pretty much solo also. I had a team of two other developers when we first designed the site, but I did about 90% of it. Since the launch of the site two years ago, I have been the only person maintaining it.

Fortunately we designed it from the start to be somewhat self-maintaining. Each of our ministry areas has their own page. Each page has five main elements that they can add or remove at their choosing: Events, Announcements, Prayer Requests, Articles and Links. Each section has an Add New, Edit and Delete button. Each item within a section has a "date to post" and a "date to pull", so they can schedule items to be displayed in advance. They can rearrange the sections as they want them.

Most the sections use an HTML editor much like the one I'm using right now to type this post. (The editor we use is RadEditor (http://www.telerik.com/Default.aspx?PageId=1586) from Telerik). The RadEditor comes with its own ImageManger and DocumentManager, so they can upload images and documents to their pages without a lot of help.

The main thing I do every week is upload the audio sermon files, maintain our online event registrations, add new church-wide events to the calendar, etc.

Chuck
West Side Christian Church
http://www.wschurch.org/

[camainc]

By the way, Cameron, your site is awesome. Did you do the graphics work yourself?

[iamcam]

Thanks! I like how you've laid-out the information on your site - there is a good clear separation of information elements.

The people who designed the site have come and gone. The current team simply updates the content and have added a bit of design things here and there, but nothing too huge.

We are, however, looking at a complete redesign hopefully by the end of the year. It'll have a complete CMS (content management system) backend.