A Web-tastic week
This week has been “Web-tastic!” I have gotten several of my Web projects into a beta or production state. Haha… it sounds like I actually do projects like that.
Anyway, I wrote earlier this week about launching fbcbelton.me and our serving opportunities. We’re now starting to hear from members and regular attenders, and we’ve started receiving database updates and requests to volunteer for opportunities. Pretty good for a week!
Yesterday I launched commenting on sermons. I’m using Disqus to do it. It’s a little awkward to have two commenting systems on the same Web site, but I don’t really know an easy way around that - other than using Disqus for the whole site (not really interested in that). My boss thought it’d be good to give people the opportunity to interact with each other in response to the sermon. I totally agree, and I think some weeks it’ll be much more active than others. It’d be interesting if the pastor started asking people to head to the Web site and comment. I was surprised how much coding I had to do to make this process automated, but now that it’s automated, we’re good to go.
We have begun beta testing our online room reservation and calendaring form. I don’t really want to send the URL for that and have a whole bunch of people innundate it. This is a way for us to archive all our room set-up forms for the future, send out e-mail notifications to appropriate parties, and create a work flow. Instead of having binders loaded with these things, we can make MySQL do the work for us. Instead of asking the newsletter lady and the Web guy to type illegible handwritten blurbs, we can make the people type them in themselves. Instead of having incomplete forms dropped in our mailboxes, we can run validation and make sure all the required fields are filled in.
Finally, I made the mobile version of our church Web site much more functional and pretty this week. I added shortcuts for those not using a touch screen, added some color, added our logo, removed some fluff, and added some very important pages that I had omitted at first.
That’s pretty good for a week! Tomorrow I have to go back to my network admin stuff. It’s much less glamorous. :)