New YWAM International Chairman's Team Web Site
This week has been a very productive week for us as far as web-design goes. We have been working on a new template / skin for our YWAM - Reef to Outback web-site and have also been re-designing the web-site for the YWAM International Chairman's Team.It's been a real team effort getting the site up to where it is now from where it was last week (actually even up till this morning when I finally brought it live).
- Josiah Ritner has been hard at it with the design elements for the page
- David Couper has been working on making sure it does all that they need for the team
- I've been working on getting Josiah's design into a working template that meets all of David's requirements.
Below are some of our notes for how we developed the site:
Wordpress CMSFor a site like this one Wordpress is a great content management system. It's not powerful enough for a full YWAM Base web-site, but great for individuals and separate ministries like the YWAM International Chairman's Team.
- Default Wordpress Kubrick Theme
- New images and design from Josiah
- Front Page
- About the ICT
- Podcast Link
- Newsletter Link
- Storehouse Fund Link
- News
- Two latest news items
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New YWAM Office Webcam
I've set-up a web-cam in our office at YWAM - Reef to Outback today. We already have six other webcams installed around our centre (one is broken...) for people to look at, but this is the first one actually in an office.I figured that if we did our office first it wouldn't be as "controversial" as if I installed it in another office. I only wish that it had a wide angle lense as that would be able to show the whole office.
Check out the image here...
It won't automatically refresh, you will need to do that manually. I am uploading a new image every minute or so. Also since it is hooked up to my own computer it won't always be a fresh image, only when my computer is plugged in to the camera and I am in the office.
I'm using a free program called booruWebCam, which is a great little free program for uploading webcam images to an FTP server. Very small (just a single .exe file) and it only uses up 6MB of system memory when it is running. It's simple, but it's exactly what I was looking at for this type of application.
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Welcome to Missionary Blogs visitors
Missionary Blogs is a site that lists and links to quite a few different Missionary Blogs from around the web. From what I can tell they are currently listing over 200 different missionary blogs and today featured a few blogs from missionaries in Australia, including this site.It is a very interesting site to view and the number of missionary bloggers out there is quite amazing. They list at least 45 "veteran" bloggers that have been blogging for over 5-years. This blog, and my previous one which you can still view here, were started in June 2004, which I thought was along time ago.
Compared to some of the bloggers on the site I am but a baby...
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Having Fun with Logos
This is a fun little tool to play around with if you are bored, Web2.0 Logo Creator by Alex P.
The "Beta" tag is optional, as is the reflection, but it's kind of fun to play around with. Not too customizable as you can't change the font size, but it's meant as a parody anyway, so it's just sort of fun to play with.
Source: Robert Scoble - Web 2.0 logo generator...
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YWAM Video Ads on Google AdWords
I was actually a bit jealous when I first saw the video advertisement for YWAM GTA on Google Adwords (GTA stands for Greater Toronto Area, not Grand Theft Auto in this case). I was actually hoping that we would be the first YWAM base to come up with a video ad on there, but they beat us to it.Unfortunately I think that they could probably have done a better job on the ad, and I am not alone as Dan Lee from Blog Ministry feels the same. You can read his commentary about the ad at Blog Ministry: YWAM Google Video Ad Too Long. His commentary was mostly the same as ours that we discussed in the office here. Here are some of the points that we talked about:
- Too long - The video is about three minutes. Good for a church presentation, way too long for a commercial. Dan points this out as well.
- It uses copyrighted music - Even though I am from Canada originally I don't know what the law says there about using copyrighted music on the web. In Australia for us to use copyrighted material we would need to know exactly how many times it was played and then pay per listen or viewing.
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Should You Be Uploading Content to YouTube?
For some of our YWAM - Reef to Outback Video Podcasts we have been uploading the video onto YouTube for embedding into web-pages and articles. This has actually been working quite well as I have been able to provide an embedded video for people to view if they are on the site, or they also have the option of downloading the video in a different format.After reading an article on YouTube however I am starting to re-think this idea. Part of the idea of uploading our stuff onto there was the whole "viral marketing" thing where if we produce quality videos it will drive traffic to our web-site. The article on Boing Boing however is making me rethink that idea.
It seems that YouTube's terms and conditions may actually mean that when you upload a video to YouTube you will actually be pretty much giving them ownership of the video... You can read their full article at Boing Boing: YouTube's new policy says: we own your content. There are a few different ideas of what exactly the terms and conditions mean (check out Boing Boing: More on YouTube's controversial new terms and conditions), but it highlights the need to read these Terms and Conditions, and maybe have a lawyer ready to then translate it for you into normal English.
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I am a full time volunteer with Reef to Outback - Youth With A Mission (YWAM) where I work in Communications and Information Technology. I am married to a wonderful wife, we have a five year old son and a one year old daughter.
