iThemes Premium WordPress Themes Site Open for Business

If you’ve been following this blog for long, you know that for the last 10 months I’ve been doing freelance web design work. And recently, I left the awesome church staff where I served for the last two years to start a new venture called iThemes.com.

Well …. today we officially launched and rolled our first called Essence.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out some new church-specific themes over at ChurchTheme.com. But, I think, out of the box, these themes could be used very effectively for a small to medium church website.

P.S. – We’re offering a 25% discount on all Essence themes until Thursday, Jan. 31 by entering in this discount code: LAUNCH. To redeem this, simply click the “Add to Cart” button, then enter LAUNCH into the discount code box and Update your cart to reflect your savings.

January 24, 2008 · Filed Under Church Websites

Comment

5 Realities of Church Website Design

Over the last five-plus years of working in the churches, I’ve honed my philosophy of church websites quite a bit. I’m been frustrated often because ministry leaders usually don’t have a concept or idea of what goes into a typical website and the cost of the sites they have dreamed up.

Granted, I like to dream too. But dreaming costs money. And no matter what someone says, web designing is more complex (read: hard) than typical graphic design (i.e. your Sunday bulletin). Meaning, it takes more time, it costs more money, and it’s overall — just harder.

This is why most graphic designers haven’t crossed over. Most graphic designers don’t have to know how to create and tweak code in order to produce beautiful designs. Throw in the fact that web surfers use numerous different browsers, of which all render websites differently, and you can see why it took me so long to do it.

So with all this in mind, here’s a couple of things I’ve come back to often when trying to educate ministry leaders on my philosophy of church websites design and production:

1. Great websites cost money.

Most ministers will see a great website and think that for $39.99 they can have one exactly like it. But if you want a quality church websites, you need to realize, it will cost you a lot more than $39.99. Read more

November 28, 2007 · Filed Under Church Websites

Comment

A Church Event Calendar WordPress Plugin

Although it was designed for touring bands to be able to announce their concert dates, GigaPress could also be the answer to helping churches who are using WordPress post an easy event schedule to their websites.

Here’s a screenshot of what it could look like:

November 27, 2007 · Filed Under Church Websites

Comment

A New Premium Dark WordPress Theme

We recently released another premium WordPress theme to our inventory — Dark News Theme.

It could be used by a church, for a contemporary look. It has a couple of great features, including using a Features post section for upcoming events, and more …