Comments on: The lapsed church website editor

By: chris clark

chris clark — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:43:38 +0000

Ours is pretty static apart from postings of the weekly newsheet which then means all the website editor has to do is to upload that as a PDF which is quite manageable.

http://sspeterandpaul-rustington.org.uk/

Could really do with a system that automatically linked the calendar to ACNY.

By: The Laughing Housewife

The Laughing Housewife — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:04:15 +0000

I feel your pain. I edit our church website as well the FB and Twitter accounts and my own blog (and following other blogs to keep mine alive). It’s a lot of work.

We are currently updating our website (and have been for eight months; but that’s another story) and the difficulty is keeping it fresh and interesting. So no help here, then.

By: Margaret

Margaret — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:01:56 +0000

If only our church was built in 1982 instead of 1182 it might have a dampproof course, proper heating and loo.

Our church website posts podcasts of sermons which is great if you can’t get to church but they stopped posting last September. Is this a website editor problem or were there no sermons worth posting in that period? Should we allow them to be reviewed/recommended on line a la Trip Adviser or Amazon?

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 08:30:31 +0000

Lots of ways to insert a calendar… one very simply way is to store your calendar data in Google Calendar, and use an iframe to embed that in your site. Simple and very easy to set up. I have found the Google Calendar user interface to be very quick and easy to use – important if you’re planning to put every service in individually, as we do for clarity.

There are also WordPress plugins that will provide a calendar within the WordPress UI itself, typically with each event being either a post or (nowadays) a custom post type which you update within the WordPress admin interface. On a non-church site I use “Event Calendar 3″ which seems to have fallen into disuse. Time to look again at alternatives.

For our church site I ended up using Google Calendar, but writing my own plugin to pull the data in from Google and show it how I wanted it – this was nontrivial, but was jolly handy in a parish with three buildings, as the “normal” Google Calendar embed wouldn’t show the venues by default. For the current site revamp I will be looking at out-of-the-box alternatives, “Google Calendar Events” looks quite possibly flexible enough for me to be able to dump my own plugin.

By: David

David — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 23:47:14 +0000

Here’s a technical question. It looks like the website is built on WordPress, how will you be getting a calendar onto the front page. I need to do something similar with a different Church website also built on WordPress. It too hadn’t been updated for a while, so we went dramatic and ditched the early 2000s frameset for a proper website.

By: Archdruid Eileen

Archdruid Eileen — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:26:54 +0000

I often think the important thing is to blog every day, and just keep going when it turns rubbish. I owe that, at least, to my public.

And surely you could just write about what the space where the church now is, was like in the 14th century?

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:11:47 +0000

You keep a fine website Archdruid Eileen. I like your 14th Century idea, but sadly our church was only built in about 1982.

Any tips you can give on how to post every day on a blog without it turning rubbish would be appreciated though.

By: Archdruid Eileen

Archdruid Eileen — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:05:56 +0000

I would like to think I shamed you into this admission with my post on church websites. But you were probably too busy not updating the Twitter account to read it.

Have you thought of just posting updates about what the church was like in the 14th Century? I believe that’s very popular.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:02:28 +0000

PS Please talk a bit in the comments. This is the only thing that can redeem this dreadful blog post.