A website with nothing on it is pretty useless. It doesn’t inform of serve any function if it’s just a list of pages, so you’ll need to get some material on it. Depending on the size of your church, this can be a very different task but whatever the case, you should look into getting other people to help and assist you with creating content for the church site. Here are a few items you’ll want to consider as well as why it’s a good idea not to do it alone.
Fairphone 2: The Ethical Phone Gets An Upgrade
A few years back we looked at the issues facing buying an ethical smartphone took a peak at the Fairphone from the company of the same name.
At the time it was a brave and interesting idea to make an “ethical” smartphone by an independent group and not a larger company. Bearing in mind this occurred when stories about factory conditions in the companies Apple was hiring to produce phones were rife, the idea of an ethical smartphone hit the right time.
Now, some three years later, Fairphone are back with the Fairphone 2.
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A Church Website Case Study: Which WordPress Theme Should Your Church Use? [Series]
Hopefully you’ve now got a better idea about what you want out of a theme and what you want from plugins for your church site. Now it’s time to find a good theme to build off of. Of course, everyone’s answer will be different to this question based on the purpose of their site and the appearance they want to give off.
For example, a more traditional church who is looking to serve its current congregation may answer this very differently to a more contemporary church who are looking to inform and attract potential visitors of the church.
However, there are a few popular providers of church specific themes and WordPress themes that you might want to check out.
A Church Website Case Study: Your Local Development Environment [Series]
Every now and again a coding horror story pops up on the web. One where someone has one character wrong and so it ends up deleting everything on the system, or takes a whole site down and so on.
It seems so silly until it happens to you one day.
That’s why a local development environment is so important. You don’t want to make a huge mistake and lose everything.
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Quitter: A Mac App To Hide Distractions
One of the aspects that attracted me to the Mac and Apple products in particular was the way they dealt with notifications and encouraged an simpler interface with fewer distractions. Of course you can achieve similar results with Windows and android, and you can also make your apple devices over complicated and very distracting, but in my experience more developers are trying to create simple interfaces for Apple devices and help handle distractions.
With that in mind, enter Quitter a new (free) Mac app from Marco Arment that does one simple thing but does it well.
A Church Website Case Study: Themes vs Plugins [Series]
A while back I picked up a WordPress theme which has some interesting functions baked into it. I used it for a good while but over time the appearance started to look very dated and development slowed on the theme. After a while I decided it was time to switch to a different theme but I found myself trapped. I had used some of the features (including custom post types) that we baked into the theme. By changing theme, I’d lose all those posts, some of which had great SEO value.
A similar but less dramatic situation with our church website, as we looked to update the theme we came across some functionality, including certain custom post types, that were linked to the theme. This meant that if we changed theme, we’d lose some of the settings.
This is why it is important to choose correctly when to use a theme and when to use a plugin in WordPress.
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