The first part of redesigning our site required that we think through what it would encompass and defining the requirements. We looked at a few things including:

1. Defining what we do well as a church.
2. Defining who we are.
   “ We are a grace-oriented, Bible church that seeks to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ”
3. Narrowing down our target audience / who we serve. (warning this is very generalized for the sake of simplicity”.

   ”We serve middle-aged families. The husband works at Rockwell and the wife is a stay-at-home mom with three children. They shop at Kohl’s, Target, and Hy-Vee. They live in Hiawatha or Cedar Rapids and their children are in the Linn-Mar or Cedar Rapids school district.:

4. Defining where we want to go. What’s the win?
   ”We want to have a web site that is accurate, up-to-date and is able to scale to serve the needs of our growing church family. It needs to accommodate the needs of multiple worship venues, our capital campaign and our building/relocation project. We want all event sign-up and payments to be done online.”

We then defined what the objectives would be for our team. These needed to be defined very clearly to enable us to stay on target.

i) We want to position ourselves for relocation and growth

ii) We want to provide self-service features that connect people to ministry and groups

iii) We want to provide accurate, up-to-date information that is easy to locate

iv) We want to minimize site maintenance

v) We want to reduce the clutter in order to maximize our impact – less is more

vi) We want our web site to be an extension of our brand/ministry

vii) We want the web site to be the primary place of communication and promotion

viii) We want the user of our web site to be in control of their online interaction/experience with the ability to push content to those who request it

We then looked at what was currently working for us on our current site. This included things like:

1. Streaming Media
2. Iconic home page promotions
3. Calendar
4. Unique design

We then defined what was not working on our current website, our current hurdles that were keeping us from completing the project – and how we would over come them – as well as our current assets we have to make the project a reality.

Up next: Creating a content map.

One of the tools I rely on often is Xmarks. Xmarks allows me to sync my favorites between Internet Explorer and Firefox as well as my Firefox passwords between computers.

It is great to be able to have a page open in the office at work when I leave the office for the day, and when I return home open the browser on my home computer and have it open in the same spot.

I never have to worry about not having a saved password to favorite as well.

If you currently do not have a tool to sync favorites between browsers and computers as well as passwords you might give Xmarks a shot.

I have been thinking a lot about the projects on the list for this next year and what we are currently testing. Currently the plans are to:

1. Switch the remaining staff over to Office 2007 in late May / early June

2. Move to Exchange 2007 in late June. ( we are currently testing this)

3. Possibly switch to Forefront security (currently we are testing it on our test domain)

4. Deploy terminal services web function from Server 2008 for staff wanting access to the network remotely.

5. Upgrade from ISA 2004 to ISA 2006 ( well more of a clean install- you cannot upgrade from ISA Standard to ISA 2006 Enterprise for some reason)

6. Implement a VLAN structure and deploy a campus wide public wireless network solution

7. Expand our current touch screen / deploy a finger print check-in solution.

8. Work with our communications team to design a new website in Shelby’s ArenaChMS product.

9. Enhance on monitoring of servers / critical network resources.

10. Investigate VOIP phone systems and come up with a solution for VOIP.

11. Deploy Live Communications Server for our instant messaging / presence solution.

12. Convert web / applications / and backup domain controllers over to VMware or Windows Virtual Server 2005 (any one have any strong opinions here?- I would like to discuss)

Well thats all the big plans for this next year- I am sure others will come up.

Comment if you would like to talk about what we have chosen to use for any of these projects or if you have any ideas on what to use.

There has been one thing about my bank that I have never liked….. and it should be a simple fix for them, yet they have never done it.

They do not have there host headers properly set. When you goto there site with out the www. before it you get a page that says

Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)

Try it for your self…. http://linnareacu.com vs. http://www.linnareacu.com

So far that is the only thing I do no like about my bank.