As the parent of an almost 3 year old, we are keen to foster in her a seeking heart, a heart that knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is all, He is I AM.

Ever since we knew we were expecting we’ve quietly looked at different books we could include in life that weren’t preachy, but reflected a natural life of including God in the centre of what you do. We found Stephen Elkins great drawings and he has a bunch of great books for young (& young at heart).

When I joined the Book Sneeze program the first book offered to me for review was this 100 Prayers God Loves to Hear, 100 Praise Songs. It was a pleasant surprise to find it was a Stephen Elkins book. When the book arrived our little one eagerly ripped into the package and squealed with delight when she saw not 1 but 2 CD’s of music. As I type this she’s dancing round in circles to the CD in the computer.

The book has many well-known prayers, graces and little stories sprinkled through it. It’s easy to sit and share the book with her. I was a little disappointed that the CD’s don’t reflect the prayers – instead they are simply 100 praise songs that have been matched to a prayer. Still the music is fun and little one loves to listen and flick through the book.

We are slowly introducing more of these prayers into our everyday life with the little one, encouraging her to explore what it means to have a relationship with a God who wants to know you.

If you have a little one, I recommend this – or any of the Stephen Elkins books.

Other posts you might enjoy

1. Farewell Sir Ed
2. Freelance Book
3. The iPad & Why you are probably NOT the target audience

When I joined the Pakuranga Baptist Church worship team as a singer and guitarist/bassist my first question was - “where do I get music from?“

This was the first time I’d really been involved in worship (well I was as a kid, but then I was a drummer and didn’t really need music), and so I didn’t have my own collection.

The answer I received surprised me “there is a file cabinet over there with music you can photocopy“ – umm okay. Being an online guy I figured there had to be an easier way, especially when I moved into worship leading and wanted a much better way to search through songs, find resources and such like. I asked our creative director if there was a better way and he said, “Yes, I’ve been working on a spread sheet that you can use”

This wasn’t going to work – sure you can search for names, you can check common sequences and such like, but there is no way to search lyrics etc.

WordPress to the rescue

I’d just completed transitioning the church from using Powerpoint for songs to using Zionworx (We’ve since moved to ProPresenter on Mac – look for a post soon on technology in worship), and during this transition our creative director wrote a Windows script to convert Powerpoint files to text files so we could import them to Zionworx. I wondered if I could use this collection of text files and the wonderful XML importer for WordPress.

I wrote a quick PHP script that would read the text files one by one and create one large XML file in the WordPress format. I then created a clean WordPress install & imported this XML file. Suddenly I had a WordPress install full of 180 songs. Of course it didn’t go completely smoothly – there were issues where either the original Powerpoint to Text or Text to XML scripts had split titles and such like. But it didn’t take long to whip through and clean up the ones that weren’t right.

Grabbing a theme

Next I needed a theme that would allow us to quickly show the songs, and be extensible so we could add extra elements to each song.

I hunted around a bunch of free and paid and settled on Basic – by Elegant Themes (Note: – that IS an affilate link, if you do buy one, please help support Studiowhiz, otherwise the non-affilate link is here).

One of the reasons I picked Basic was because of its simple nature. It’s a very clean simple theme that can quickly be adapted. One thing I did was hack the sidebar to use the WordPress custom fields for extra song data.

This side bar has information such as:

• Usual song sequence
• Usual song key
• Chord sheet – for guitarists
• Lead sheet – for singers, pianists etc
• MP3 – great for new songs
• YouTube – link to a YouTube version
• Last time the song was sung & song count – great for CCLI records
• Song printing options

This makes it super easy now for team members to grab the music they need for songs, and the worship team can keep tabs on what songs are being sung and how often. When introducing a new song, we can put a MP3, song sheets & a link to the YouTube versions of other churches doing the songs. This really helps the teams quickly get up to speed with songs.

WordPress plugins to help

Of course WordPress is fantastic – of course plugins make it just THAT much better, and yes of course I do have a few extra plugins installed.

WP-Table Reloaded: I use WP Table Reloaded for the page with our team roster on it. This plugin makes it so easy to create reasonably complex and large tables, and updating them is really simple.

WPTouch iPhone Theme: Less a plugin, more a theme, WPTouch is perfect for worship leaders with iPhones, iPads, Android and such like phones. From the phone you can search posts, find songs and check lyrics – it’s brilliant.

YARPP: (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) has to be one of my favourites, especially in the context of a songs database. This plugin can use the category, tags and lyrics of a song to help suggest others. Now it’s not perfect, it is after all using words to match against words (rather than semantic meaning). I’ve found this really helpful just to spark those thoughts – “oh maybe this song, rather than that song”

Adaptations to WordPress

If I was setting this up today with WordPress 3.0 – I’d probably invest in setting up some custom post types. But really we don’t add much – when there is a new song I add it, otherwise we do have the church secretary update the site after the sunday from the Run Sheet – to update play dates and counts. So when it comes to adaptations and changes I didn’t really make many.

Alphabetical list: one thing of course that makes sense for a songs database is an alphabetical list of the songs. This is something blogs don’t do – they tend to order by date. So I created a page template that I could use to list the songs.

Here’s the code I used to generate the alphabetical list … note the 200 – we only have 180 songs, so 200 was more than enough for us
<h1>Alphabetical List of Songs</h1>
<ul>
php
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts('numberposts=200&order=ASC&orderby=title');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
?>


php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Other Changes: because of WordPress’ custom fields I really didn’t need to change much else. I setup some custom fields for things like Chord Sheets, Lead Sheets, MP3, YouTube links etc. Then in the side bar I wrote some IF statements to check if they exist, if they do – write them out, if they don’t … don’t.

Music Sheets: We grab our PDF music sheets from CCLI, I download them to my local computer and then attach them to each song (or post) using the WordPress Media Upload tools – just as you would upload a post image. I then put the URL to each PDF into the appropriate custom field so they are collated in the sidebar.

What about copyright?

Okay this is a tricky one. As a church we have to honour local copyright laws & of course we want to honour the licenses for music we have. We are members of CCLI and we obtain most music from that fantastic source.

The way we get around – or should I say, work with copyright issues, our Songs Database is not public. It is behind .htaccess and only team members have usernames and passwords. Our CCLI license allows us to make photocopies for our worship teams (we do have to account for these). We figure that doing this online cuts down on wasted paper & allows us to better track how many copies we have.

As for the MP3 – many churches distribute a CD of music for learning new songs. We figure that by having these online and stating that these are ONLY for learning music, that we honour the intent of the copyright laws. We have a church iTunes account which is fantastic as we can purchase the single MP3 we need to learn – this goes to learning, and adds music to our church music collection for playing during offerings etc etc.

Again, none of this is public – and we monitor site usage etc.

Summary

So there you have it, a quick way to use WordPress to help your worship team have a fully indexed, searchable, online songs database that can really save time. Now when I create a Sunday Set List, I email to my worship team, with a list of songs and links to the songs on our Songs Database. They can login, check the song, grab any music sheets they need.

Future Thoughts: we need to spend more time correctly categorising and tagging songs. Through a combination of Categories and Tags you could say that this song is a Praise song, or Worship song, then tag it with things like LOVE, PEACE, HOLY of HOLIES, REFLECTIVE etc and allow you to build up a powerful online understanding of your church music – this would of course massively improve the YARPP system too.

It would also be an advantage to rank songs by popularity rather than always by alphabetical order. The other thing I’d like to change is the way the WordPress search works. At the moment if you search by an exact title match it sometimes ranks other songs higher.

Hope that helps

I hope this helps you and your church. It has made a massive difference to us – even the older (less computer savvy) worship team members love using it. It’s amazing how something so simple can really streamline the whole process.

Other posts you might enjoy

1. Using Firefox & Google to find media
2. 10 awesome wordpress themes for churches
3. WordPress: Coding it sucks

Here’s a quick tip I just found to resolve potential issues on blogs – specifically WordPress, but I’m told this trick works anywhere you are loading multiple Javascript frameworks.

Warning: I’m no javascript expert, I’m a hack. I’ll tinker with things, hunt online, try things – if they work, cool. If not .. well I usually move on.

One of the beauties of WordPress is the ability to turn on and off plugins easily. You can find new plugins for your site so simply and without knowing any code you can get new features running. However, there is no standard for wordpress plugins. Developers use whatever code, libraries and resources they want too.

This means you could have one plugin using jQuery 1.4.1 and another using jQuery 1.6.2, another using Prototype, another MooTools etc.

The issue with this (as I found out recently) is these can cause conflicts between each other. It seems quite common that Prototype and jQuery will conflict. This is something that happened to me after installing the fantastic LightView Plus plugin on my wife’s blog BurntMuffin.com recently.

The plugin failed to work – I whipped open Chrome’s Developer console and found a strange error:

Object # has no method ‘dispatchEvent’

After a bit of hunting around I found this jquery.noconflict option on a forum – related to the forum btw, not to WordPress.

I thought I’d give it a shot. Now this HAS to load after you load jQuery – so I figured why not slap it on the bottom of the page:
<script ="text/javascript">
jQuery.noConflict();
</script>

Badda bing .. no more error & the plugin works as expected.

Again, I can’t say it’ll work in every instance – but it worked for me.

Other posts you might enjoy

1. 5 plugins for WordPress you might have missed
2. WordPress: Coding it sucks
3. WordPress sucks – but I still love it

I should be at church – not writing a blog post about resources for churches, but I’m sick, so am “resting” today. Hmm maybe I should be curled up in bed .. oh well. I wanted to share some fantastic resources I found online. It’s by no means exhaustive – there are so many great resources out there. This is just a list of some of the ones I visit & use.

Web Resources:

Mister Nifty

Mister Nifty is a blog site by Brian Fegter, dedicated to finding great resources for churches – he has some really great stuff on there, and share advice and tips for getting more tech for your buck.
Some recommended posts

• Dear church designer
• Dear church designer Part 2
• Worried about Facebook privacy?

» Visit misternifty.com

Zoecity

Zoecity can be classified as a digg clone. It’s a place to find other resources. According to their about page:

Zoecity is a place to discover everything that is happening right now in the Christian world that impacts you.

They sift through hundreds of christian posts and sites and put them up on the site every day.
» Check out zoecity.com

Churchplantmedia

Technically Church Plant Media (Twitter: @myCPM) could be in the next section – but I’ve put it here because really it’s a resource. These guys specialise in the creation of church websites. They do all the heavy lifting & create some stunning work. Their setup prices are pretty darn good really (although if you are outside the USA remember they price in US$), their monthly fee is a little high – however they do take care of everything, so you are paying for peace of mind, something I’ll gladly support! If you need a site & don’t have web people in your church – then these guys are a good choice. I love their design & their code is all very solid.
» Church Plant Media – for building your church website

Mobile Salt

Once you have your church site you are going to need a mobile version and this is where MobileSalt comes to play. These guys specliaise in creating a mobile ready version of your church website WITH all the features you’d expect. So those people in your congregation with iPhones, Android etc can keep in touch easily on the road – a great way to share your sermons etc.
» mobilesalt.com for your church mobile needs

Church Media Design

Okay I’ll say it, I love Brad (Twitter: @cmdtv) over at CMD – what else could I say? This guy has dedicated time, resources and money to creating free media, updating resources on his blog and publishing a video podcast encouraging and sharing tips to help you get more out of your church media. This is a fantastic site for great motion backgrounds, along with inspirational looks at what others are doing, and Brad’s own tips. It’s seeing Brad’s work that makes me wish I wast 10 years younger and had time to learn AfterEffects.

Recommended links:

• Freebies
• Inspiration
• The Podcasts

» Get inspired at Church Media Design

Churchcrunch

Okay it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that churchcrunch.com (Twitter: @churchcrunch) is a Techcrunch clone – but hey that’s okay. The site is dedicated to sharing happenings in the christian tech scene, specifically tailored towards churches and the technology that is now available for churches. It’s great to see people encouraging and sharing the resources that can be used today for churches. They also have some great behind the scenes type posts to help you understand how ‘others’ are doing ‘it’ – for example:

• Understanding WordPress Themes & licensing
• How Gateway church streams live services

» Learn more and empower your ministry at ChurchCrunch.com

Pastor/Church Plant resources

Pastors

A site from the team of Rick Warren (Twitter: @RickWarren) called pastors.com (Twitter: @RWToolbox) is set up specifically to share tips, resources and thoughts to encourage & equip pastors and ministry leaders. However that doesn’t mean the likes of you and me can’t learn. There are a ton of really good posts and resources here. I could spend many hours just absorbing the content on this site & the impact it can have in your life as you dig deeper into relationship with God … there really is some great stuff here.

Definitely check out:

• Ministry Tool Box
• Connect with others on the forum
• Tools and Resources

» More tools from RickWarren and the team at Pastors.com

The Well

The Well (Twitter: @thewelltv) is the ministry of a church in Orlando, with the mission to share great teaching, resources and content online. Technically not a church resource, but rather a source to encourage you, your team and your congregation.
» Drink from the Well

Acts29

The Acts 29 Network (Twitter: @acts29News) is a team dedicated to helping those who are planting churches. This website & ministry is set up to train and equip those who are trying to reach out and start a new church. Starting a new church can be very hard, and having the support and backing of the likes of Acts 29 can help you through this times when you have questions and no one to turn too.
» More on the Acts 29 Network

LifeChurch – Resources

No list could be considered without adding LifeChurch.tv (Twitter: @lifechurchtv) to it. LifeChurch have to be considered one of the leading churches embracing technology as a tool for the sharing of God’s kingdom. They really do some pretty great stuff & they have a ton of solid resources .. I’ll let the resources talk for them:

• Open Lifechurch free resources for your church
• ChurchMetrics.com track your church growth
• YouVersion.com the bible online – reading, sharing, learning
• VideoTeaching.com video resources
• swerve a blog for church ministry leaders
• babelwithme.com translation services for ministry

» check out LifeChurch.tv Resources

Social Church resources:

SoChurch

Communication is something new technology makes easier – although it can be complicated. SoChurch.com (Twitter: @sochurch) plans to change that. I say plans, because it’s still very much hidden. Reading the team page shows you that SoChurch is powered by a Who’s Who of web & tech nuts in the online community and I’m really excited about SoChurch and how it will empower churches to communicate in the very near future. I’m signed up to find out more and can’t wait to start exploring this.
» SoChurch making communication easier

TableProject

Another ‘alpha/beta’ solution that is yet to go public that I’m hugely excited about is Table Project (Twitter: @tableproject). I actually know LESS about this than I do about sochurch – but my understanding is it’s an online tool to help churches and their small groups. I found out about Table Project when Josh Lewis (@joshlewis) joined as lead designer (or creative, or web nut or .. something like that) Update: Josh corrected me, he’s Lead Web Developer!. They’ve been super secret with what’s going on – but again, I can’t wait to learn more and see how this team can help churches build stronger small groups which in turn help small grous do what they do best – encouraging each of us into a deeper relationship with God!
» Sign up at tableproject.org for more

Thoughts

I’m hugely encouraged to see more and more ministries sharing and helping others. It’s wonderful to see the family of Christ from around the world encouraging each other, using the tools & skills God has blessed them with to empower His kingdom and share the love and desire for relationship that God has for each and everyone one of us.

May God bless you, your church and the spreading of His gracious love to all.

Other posts you might enjoy

1. The curse of blogging
2. 10 awesome wordpress themes for churches
3. Making the most of your online time

There are a number of WordPress plugins you can install, here I’m just going to walk through some plugins I’ve found recently that really help you take your wordpress to the next level – helping churches get more from their blog.

Analytics360

When it comes to communications, you really can’t look past MailChimp – they even have a page dedicated to helping churches leverage MailChimp for communications (read Mailchimp for churches here). Mailchimp have a bunch of plugins but the one I think that YOU really should install is Analytics360.

This plugin links Google Analytics and MailChimp (although you can use it without MailChimp) and pulls this data to your dashboard giving you a great overview of your site and newsletter analytics.

Highly recommended mailchimp plugins:

• Analytics360
• ListSubscribe – build your subscriber list
• Mail Archives – pull your newsletter archives

Lightview Plus

WordPress does a good job handling content and it’s getting better, however when it comes to handling galleries, Lightview Plus is the best plugin for media. The plugin does what most “lightbox” type plugins do, that is give you a lovely light box modal popup for images. Where Lightview Plus shines is the way it supports media types., and galleries. It’s my favourite media plugin.

WP Greet Box

One of the best ways to engage with your users is to meet them, greet them just as you would if they walked in the door of your church. WP Greet Box allows you to customise a message to your visitors depending on where they’ve come from.

Customise a message for Facebook fans, Twitter followers or people from any one of over a dozen other sites. You can extend this plugin and use it for all sorts of things.

WPTouch iPhone Theme

Okay it’s not really a theme like the WordPress themes from our friends at WooThemes, it is however a plugin that is primarily a theme. One quick install and you can have an iPhone (Android, Blackberry etc) ready website and you really SHOULD install this!

I recommend EVERY BLOG have this plugin installed as more and more people link from Twitter or Facebook on their mobiles – so meet them where they are. WPTouch iPhone Theme is free, as I’m writing this I’ve just found out they have a “pro” version too – you can learn more about WPTouch Pro here (I’ll see if I can buy a copy and review it soon)

WP Maintenance Mode

WP Maintenance Mode is now one of the first plugins I install now – it’s so much stronger than the default Maintenance Mode and gives you much more control. It comes with a selection of themes for your site, I personally love the clean elegant “Only Typo” version. With quick customisation of the message, the ability to add you Analytics code – this is a must install plugin.

Missed something?

I’m sure there are other gems out there – what are some of your favourites?

Other posts you might enjoy

1. Quick WordPress Conflict Tip
2. WordPress for worship teams
3. WordPress sucks – but I still love it

Churches have a LOT to answer for when it comes to design – I tell you, some of the notices, Powerpoint and other media I’ve been given to show …. and lets not get started on some of the sermons I’ve seen projected.

Comic Sans, Times Roman (or Times New Roman), Zapfino and other flowy scripty are the usual culprits. It’s sad, when there are actually a heap of really great fonts out there.

So why can’t I use these fonts?

When you are projecting song lyrics & sermon notes, clarity should reign over any theme, font, colour or layout. If it’s not clear it’s not going to work. I’ve heard it many times “this font looks biblical” so I used it. Zapfino is one of the least biblical fonts I can think off and is very hard to read from a distance. (Side note: in Caps it’s okay but I still wouldn’t use it)

People singing songs (esp worship songs) are in a very personal place with God, chances are the song is one they are familiar with & the lyrics on the screen are there as cues – they should be able to glance at the screen, get their cue and carry on praising God. Likewise with sermons, the words should be big, clear and easy to read.

Remember the oldies

Remember while you are probably a young person (esp if you are driving the computer) a lot of your churches audience was probably born before computers were invented. At Pakuranga Baptist Church we just switched out our projector & computer (we got an iMac! Yes!) – meaning we now have more visuals behind our lyrics, and we overhauled the fonts we use. The number of older folks who’ve come up and said “thank you, we can now read the lyrics” outnumbers those who’ve said “yeah we have moving backgrounds”

Trends around themes, colours, moving backgrounds etc come and go – there is never any excuse for using bad fonts that stop people reading what’s on the screen.

So here are 35 free fonts you can use to help your congregation enjoy the song lyrics & sermons better (we’ll do a full sermon set at some stage – these fonts below refer more to titles & small/short blocks of text)

35 fonts for projection

Lets start with some simple (& probably already installed on your computer) fonts that you can’t really go wrong with. (Technically these are NOT free, the fonts that come with your computer are generally licensed, but they are installed already so you’ve already paid for them)

Arial Black

Carries more weight than Arial and can be seen clearly at greater distances

Century Gothic

A lovely elegant font with good readability over gerat distance when used in bold

Helvetica

Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are solid fonts for projection – although I’m not sure they are on all Windows platforms

Tahoma

Good clean font for clear reading at great distances

Trebuchet MS

A softer more sculpted font that carries well at distance

Verdana

Good ol’ reliable Verdana

Lets download some new fonts

If you want some new flavours in your church font directory try some of these (to download simply click the font image & you’ll be taken to the page you can download them from)

Note: fonts with a * after the name are part of a paid commercial font family. If you want the whole font family you’ll need to pay, however I’m only talking about the free weight in this article, you might need to register to download, but you don’t have to pay.

Aller

Boris Black Boxx

Don’t use this for big blocks of text as it can get very heavy, but it’s a great font for weighty text – perfect for bible verse reference (eg: John 3:16) and slide titles

Comfortaa

Use this in bold when projecting as a clean font – can get harder to read as a block of text though.

Museo 500 *

Note: Museo is a commercial font family, however 3 weights (300, 500, 700) are free. 500 makes an ideal ‘light’ font for projection at a distance

Calluna *

Note: Calluna is a commercial font family, however the regular weight is free & it’s a nice serif font face for scripture verses and blocks of text

Alte Haas Grotesk

Tuffy

Telegrafico

Telegrafico is a beautiful full caps font – sadly this means it’s not great for blocks of text, but it’s great for stand out titles

Steinem

League Gothic

Sorts Mill Goudy

Used right, Sorts Mill Goudy carries well, and gives blocks of text an elegant authority – a great “print” font that can work on screen at a distance

Junction

Bitstream Vera Serif

Old Sans Black

Gnuolane Regular *

Note: the full Gnuolane font family is a commercial font family. However the regular weight is free

Expressway Regular *

Note: the full Expresseway font family is a commercial font family. However the regular weight is free

Proletarsk

Andika Basic

Apparatus SIL

Chunk

Nilland

Nilland is a versatile font with a range of weights that means you can adjust it to suite almost any projection needs. Reads well form a distance and is not bad for blocks of text

Vegur

Ayita Pro *

Note: the beautiful Ayita font face is a paid set, however as of writing this post it’s heavily discounted with Thin Italic & SemiBold weights being free. Which is perfect because the Semi Bold Ayita Pro font is elegant and perfect for projection

Sapir

While Sapir could do with a bold weight, the regular weight is nice and carries well over distance

Surface

Matiz

If you want a more relaxed font (maybe for a youth service or family service) Matiz is a creative font that has enough weight to hold clarity and throw over distance. Just watch it when you drop the font size as the letters can ‘bleed’

Days

Insolent

Patagonia

Other posts you might enjoy

1. 23 amazing modern clean fonts
2. When being 18years old isn’t all that good
3. 12 Stunning Flowing Fonts

WordPress is rapidly becoming the defacto CMS for church websites, with it’s quick install & massive collection of plugins, you can quickly turn a WordPress blog into almost anything you need for your church. Still, you are going to need a look for your new church website – here are some themes that lend themselves to church websites.

Minimal – Elegant Themes

Minimal is an elegantly designed theme with a large central feature slider & 3 front sections for key ministry focus areas. ElegantThemes all come with a great control panel for managing your entire site from the admin panel – super easy.

» Grab Minimal here

Aperturious – UpThemes

Aperturious is designed as a photo featuring blog, however it lends itself nicely to a ministry focused website. While it doesn’t have a central home page – you can easily make one, and the blog part of this is exceptional for church sites focusing on community ministry. Great for showing the visual side of your church.

» Grab Aperturious here

Caulk – Brian McCulloh

Caulk is a modern theme designed with a magazine focus. This allows it to fit into a church setting very well. With a large feature slider on the home page plus extra feature item areas, you can quickly feature large events, and highlight smaller activities all from your home page. Elegantly designed, well put together this theme could serve your church very well.

» Grab Caulk from ThemeForest here

MixxMag – Rocket Themes

MixxMag – a very vibrant and fun magazine style wordpress theme. This theme would work really well for an emerging church with a slightly younger age. Great featured slider, key focus panels and heaps of links to deep content – this is a great theme for getting your message out there.

» Grab MixxMag from RocketThemes

Moxy – Rocket Themes

Moxy is another Rocket Themes, theme. Suffering a split personality, Moxy is on one hand elegant, fresh and clean, on the other vibrant, colourful and energetic. The top section of the theme contains a novel content slider, the bottom a lovely soft content rich area. This is a favourite theme of mine.

» Grab Moxy from RocketThemes

Afterburner – FREE from RocketThemes

Afterburner is a stripped back, magazine style theme focused on speed. There is little to sing and dance about this theme, visually. However when it comes to simply letting your church content speak – it’s perfect. With a large feature area, simple layout and great navigation – this theme allows you to quickly build your site and style it to match.

» Grab Afterburner (FREE) from RocketThemes

Outreach – Studiopress

Outreach is a theme built on the Genesis Theme Framework. While this means the theme isn’t the cheapest, it’s one of the few actually built specifically for churches. This theme is beautiful and ideally suited to church wordpress installations. With it’s large visual feature slider (fader) and central ministry blocks, Outreach has all and more of the features your church needs in a website.

» Grab Outreach & the Genesis Framework here at StudioPress

Church – Studiopress

Church – of course I couldn’t have a collection of WordPress themes for churches without a theme called “Church” – although I’m debating having this in here. Pretty simplistic & dated looking now, Church is a theme that has a simple featured area but leaves the rest of the site looking very ‘blog’ – still I’m sure it’ll find some uses out there

» Grab Church from Studiopress

Smarter – Cozmos Labs

Smarter really is a smart theme. Ideally suited to a church, the featured message box allows you to highlight a bible verse or mission statement or …. right above the featured event slider. This theme is very elegant, easy to read and lends itself to showcasing sermon messages.

» Grab Smarter from Cozmos Labs

Overeasy – Woothemes

Overeasy is very similar to Smarter on the home page, however the sub pages of each differ a lot. Overeasy contains a mix of page layouts allowing you flexibility in layouts for blog pages vs content pages. WooThemes all come with a fantastic control panel, all the assets & great support – just what you need to make setting up your church website a breeze.

» Grab Overeasy from WooThemes

Make your own?

If you are wanting to make your own WordPress theme for your church? Go for it, just don’t waste heaps of time recoding the same old stuff over and over – I’d highly recommend the use of a “framework” to take much of the grunt lifting out of your development process. Themeshaper have a great article on how to use a framework to craft your own WordPress theme

Other posts you might enjoy

1. WordPress sucks – but I still love it
2. 5 plugins for WordPress you might have missed
3. Great resources for churches online

The thing with blogging that any blogger will tell you is … write, write, write, write. Pick a topic you know about and write about it, the more unique or niche that topic the more likely you’ll find an audience.

Of course if there is an audience, then chances are you’ll have competition – and this is where I find myself. When I started Studiowhiz.com as a forum site years ago (early 2001) there were not that many resource sites around and there was a nature of sharing tips & ideas between designers and developers.

Now no longer a community, Studiowhiz.com is just my blog – and I’m a no body. I’m not a Chris Spooner, Snook, Robert Scoble, Molly or … well anybody. Sure I’ve played on that stage, been invited to write books, speak at conferences – but that’s a life I’ve left behind, especially now that I don’t actively develop, code or design anymore.

So what is Studiowhiz.com now? It’s just another blog, another tier of noise, a site that has my 2 cents added to the millions of other sites in this tech genre. I could easily real off names of some great sites, SmashingMagazine, Nopue, tutsPlus Network, and many MANY more, that do a far better job targeting their audience than I do.

So what to do?

So what to do now? This is a question going through my head a lot lately, I can’t complete .. I don’t have the time, energy or gumption to compete with these – yet I’d still like to generate some (meager) funds from the site. Studiowhiz is my “toy” fund, a fund that right now is VERY very light. I can’t even buy and iPad right now – let alone being able to replace my aging iPhone when the iPhone 4.0 comes out.

Have a little faith

So of you will know that I grew up in “the church” – a term I’m not overly comfortable with (that’s because of the box you just put me in – yes you & you know it). So anyway, I’ve never really stood up and said “Hey, I believe in Jesus Christ”, I’ve never really put that out there – till this year. Too scared of what you’ll say – oh well what ever. You’ll read or not – that’s up to you.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about in light of this blog … I’m going to start writing blog posts, reviews and commentary on the use of Media & the Web in the church of today.

It’s church Jim, but not as we know it

The church is a rapidly changing place – for the better. The emerging church sees people getting back to the reality of faith in Jesus Christ – screw the “traditions” of faith, lets get back to loving & helping PEOPLE. And to that end I want to explore how churches can use MEDIA in their ministries …

So that’s it for now …. more to come REALLY soon

Other posts you might enjoy

1. Write your way to increasing traffic
2. Planning your killer blog
3. It’s all in the title

Mobile barcodes are quickly gaining momentum – they’ve been around for years, I’ve tinkered with 2D and MS Colour Tags for years. It’s really only been in the past 3 or so months here in NZ that 2D barcodes are starting to gain movement. Of course in the USA we have Google rolling out 100,000 to restaurants to try and ramp this up.

2D Barcodes are unique in that they hold information within themselves, and the scanner app can decode this and tell you the message.

Barcodes however have been around for many years – are line based and represent numbers. Stickybits has come along and joined the two ideas + location together. Using the Stickybitst app on your iPhone or Android device you can scan ANY barcode and attach content too it.

Try this barcode:
If you scan that with your iPhone/Android you should see some info about Studiowhiz.com.

Here however is where StickyBits becomes fun – it’s social. So you are now welcome to add your comments, photos, video and other content to this barcode. When other scan it they can see the history of items added to this code.

It’s a great fun way to share content & I could see review engines for Restaurants/Venues leveraging this technology to quickly and easily gather social recommendations and share feedback straight from the venue. Barcodes on menus, till receipts, napkins or anywhere really.

The thing is you don’t have to generate a complex barcode – snap any barcode & away you go. StickyBits have the ability to make barcodes like the one above, so what are you waiting for? Start tagging the world around you with barcodes!!

Other posts you might enjoy

1. Top 5 Geekiest Tattoos
2. 4 Sale – iphonesource.org
3. About Mr K

Hot on the heels of my post on How to activate Google Buzz I bring you a quick post on how to deactivate Google Buzz.

You might have noticed there is a lot of noise in Google Buzz and people are now wondering how to clean up the Google Buzz in their Gmail Inbox. Turns out the Google Buzz item added to Google is a LABEL for incoming notes. Unlike Google Talk you can’t separate Buzz from Email – effectively Buzz is email .. just formatted in a different way.

So, if you use Google Buzz, expect to see crap in your inbox.

Help is at hand

Of course this is also a good thing, because Buzz is basically email, you can set up filter rules within Gmail to find any Buzz item and automatically filter it out to another label (How to set up filters in Gmail)

How to Kill Google Buzz

For some however setting up filters will NOT be enough and they will want Buzz gone. After all if you are already using Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck, Eventbox etc to manage your life streams, why do you want YET another?

There IS a way to turn buzz off … at the VERY bottom of your Gmail page is a tiny link “turn off buzz”. Simply scroll RIGHT to the very bottom of the page, and there is a row of links. Click turn off buzz and Google Buzz will disappear. (You can turn it back on the same way anytime you like)

NOTE:

This ONLY turns Google Buzz off in your email, it’s STILL in your Google Profile & I’ve not found anyway to turn it off outside of CLOSING your Google Account

UPDATE:

You have to do BOTH – filters & Turn Off … even with Buzz Turned off if anyone @ replies you – it will show up as an email in your inbox. If you are on some marketing list from a Brand, or …. your inbox could very quickly become unusable!

UPDATE 2:

Note: Buzz can re-activate itself if someone adds you to their list – at least that’s what it seems like. I had it turned off, went to lunch, a friend “buzzed” me (I wasn’t following him – yet) and when I opened Gmail again, Buzz was back on!

Other posts you might enjoy

1. Importance of + in email
2. Canned emails in Gmail
3. Google: slowly becoming crap