What I have been up to

It has been awhile since I have blogged about anything, let alone something of substance. I could use the life is busy/full excuse, but the nice thing is that I have actually been working on some stuff - that while not totally done, is starting to see the light of day.

I have been reworking the Crosswinds website. The previous site was one that I put together, but it was a 'manage by hand' type site where I had to do every update and change on the site. While it looked ok, the ongoing updating was kind of a pain.

This is what the front page looked like on the previous site:

The other item was in being able to manage sub-pages. I played with several different drop down menus but had trouble finding one that worked in all browsers. So this required kind of a funky sub-navigation under the main image on the page. For example in the screen shot below you will see there is a navigation under the main image for Children and Adult ministries. This lead to some confusion for users trying to find the right page.

So in trying to find a solution that could be easily updated by others as well as something that looked professional, I landed on using WordPress as the CMS and account management system. I know that I am pretty late to the game on this one as there are a ton of sites using WordPress. Below is a screen shot of the current site:

 The nice thing that this template allows is it still allows for the promotion of the current series, but also the homepage widgets allow for featuring some other content. There is also the ability to feature and link to other content on the site. For example the other slide that displays after 3 seconds is:

This image is clickable and links to this page:

The built in navigation is nice and allows for the nesting of pages and also makes this site very expandable.

Also built into this template is the ability to feature content over the top of an image.

The thing that I didn't fully understand before implimenting WordPress was the widgets! There are so many that I am having trouble staying focused. Some of the most helpful have been the All in one SEO as well Section Widget which allows you to create easy and if needed, tabbed, side widgets throughout your site.

Feel free to check out the site here: www.crosswindschurch.com

If you have any improvements for the site or if there are other widgets that you have experience with, please let me know. Also I am looking for a good widget that will allow for the site to be converted to a mobile plateform. Have played with a couple and not really happy with any of them.