Posted by benlotter on March 13, 2011 at 4:25am
I'm just about ready to advertise my web design services for ministries and churches. I would especially appreciate suggestions for the following 2 items.
- A Name / domain name
- The content of the site
For now I just made it a subdomain under an existing domain. I've been struggling to come up with its own identity.
I want to make the content on the site informative and easy to find. Whether or not someone using my services, I would like the site to help them make a better decision on how to improve or redesign their site. I'm also trying to put together a welcome video which summarizes what I do and what are my unique selling points.
- I'm thinking about adding more things under the Resources section such as
- video tutorials (technical) on module implementation for church sites
- philosophy of design discussions
- links to tools or other resources external to my site
Here's the current link to the site followed by a synopsis of how I built this site.
http://sites.crossunion.com/
Theme: Acquia Slate/Fusion/Skinr
- Modules: Drupal 6.2 with CCK/Views (entire site is basically 6 distinct views / see primary & secondary links)
- View Hacks / Flipped Table - to create the Pricing page (http://sites.crossunion.com/pricing)
- Fivestar/Voting API - used on individual plan pages at top and bottom of the pages (i.e. http://sites.crossunion.com/plans/essentials)
- ImageCache/Profiles - seen on user pages, comments and the Testimonial page (http://sites.crossunion.com/testimonials)
- Lightbox2 - used to pop-out the website images on the portfolio page (http://sites.crossunion.com/portfolio)
- Menu Trails - used to create breadcrumbs / highlight secondary menu item "Resources" (i.e. http://sites.crossunion.com/resources/why-have-church-website)
Comments
1 & 2) Bob is a pretty cool
1 & 2) Bob is a pretty cool guy over at mustardseedmedia.com
1) Regarding identity, you can do name based (based on an entity, such as people, rivers, places), which has a religious theme, or mix and match like Bob did, by including something IT related ("media") with the entity name chosen. Grammar based two way matches is what I'm meaning, such as noun/verb, adjective/noun, etc. Then you can go to a register domain name suggestion engine to check out availability and get more ideas.
2) Bob's site is useful for basic presentation ideas for video tutorials. For forums, ubercart.org's forums use drupal it seems, but it seems to do the job. I didn't completely check it out. People love legitimate links, and you can use methods such as trackbacks and pingbacks.
The pages you listed look good.
May God bless.
Paul