There has been a lot of news recently about HTML5 and the use of video. Apple is endorsing a codec (a way of encoding video) called h.264, but with any new technology it is important to understand the licensing issues involved and to make sure your church is not breaking any type of licensing requirements.  After the break I will walk you h.264 and what to expect if you are posting videos to your church website.

I have been going back and forth about this for a month. I have decided to merge my personal blog and church website ideas. It is just too hard to try and run two blogs when most of the content I want to share would go on both sites. So you should be able to access this site now through churchwebsiteideas.com and beardedblog.com. The site content will focus on my design experiences, thoughts, and how that can affect the churches online presence. Enjoy!

This morning I emailed Steve Jobs. My full time job is designing and developing flash ads and I wanted to make sure that I am preparing myself as a designer/developer for Apple’s new iAd platform. So I emailed Steve to see if the new iAds platform would allow full HTML5 animations or if we can only use HTML5 to display video based ads. Looks like we will be able to use complete HTML5 for our ads. Full email after the break.

I bought an iPad this weekend. I had to wait 2 hours in line.

Would I wait in line for two hours to get in to a church service? No.

There’s a problem with that. What do you think?

Whoa! What happened to the site? I have refreshed the design of the site with a more minimalistic feel. Over the next few weeks you will notice a few more changes at Church Website Ideas, most of which, I hope, will make this site more user friendly.  So why the change? I realized that part of my reasoning to start this blog was to share my ideas, visions, and resources with anyone who works on a church website. This refresh will help refine the focus of the site and help bring more clarity to the purpose of this site. I hope to bring you some great stuff over the next few weeks! Enjoy!

After nearly a decade of rumors Apple finally unveiled the much hyped Apple Tablet, the iPad. While this device could never live up to the mass hype that internet has built over the last decade, most people seem to be disappointed in Apple’s latest gadget. Not me. I see a tool that can help pastors and the church. After the break I outline few a reasons why this device will help you.

“I just don’t think our church is using our website.” It’s an issue I hear all the time.  The truth is that this has very little to do with your website design. It really has to do you and how your church utilizes your website. Most church websites suffer from content overload, too much content with very little focus. Keep reading to see how we can get back to simple church websites that are an effective ministry tool.

The most common question I get when talking to pastors and church website staff is: “How can I get my church to show up on page one of Google?” This is a very reasonable question and there are a lot of tactics on how to get your website to show up on the first page of Google. I am not going to write an entire article on SEO strategies or anything complex. One thing that is often overlooked is that with very little effort or skill you can get your church website to show up in the Google Business listings area of a search result.

I wanted to take time today to share wit you some images in honor of memorial day. Often it is easy for me just to blast through this holiday with out much thought. I want to encourage you all to take time this weekend to pray for our soldiers. Enjoy the long weekend.

I wanted to let everyone who visits the blog that I am back from vaction and you can expect my reagular daily updates to continue tomorrow as usual. Thank you everyone for your comments and emails while I was gone!

I wanted to take time this week to organize my thoughts about what the overall vision is for Church Website Ideas. To be honest, I did not intend for this to become something that would be popular. I have viewed this project as a way for me to express how I feel about church websites and provide some tools to help everyone out. So what is this site all about?

Today we wanted to take a look through Outreach Magazines 100 Fastest Growing Churches and see what those churches were up to online. We were a little surprised with what we found. Our thoughts were that the fastest growing churches in America would be doing some really innovative things online. We were wrong. Poor website design was very common as we went through the list. We did find 23 churches that had websites that are worth mentioning. After the jump you will find our picks for the top websites of the fastest growing churches in America.

MySpace has been around for six years now, it’s not going anywhere. I still talk to churches that are not sure if they want to jump in with a church MySpace page. MySpace provides the church an opportunity to engage in culture, connect to their community, keep members up to date on events, share sermon audio and video, and the best part is that people can find your church online, unlike your church website. I like to think of MySpace as one of many tools that churches and pastors must use in order to keep connected with their members and more importantly, their community. Over the next few weeks I will cover a few of the social network tools available to churches in an effort to help overcome the fear of taking the social network leap.

Top 5 Things You Can Do To Make Your Church Website Better Today

This was a post I originally made on my business website simplechurchmarketing.com. The idea was to get some basic information to pastors to help them with the no-duh type stuff most web designers are familiar with. Over the next five days I will be expanding this original article, exploring each aspect in more detail.