Part of the Glue

Recently I have been doing some web-desiging and was trying to figure out a way to showcase the hundreds of videos we currently have that are on youtube, vimeo and blip for our student ministry.  Currently we keep our quality vids on vimeo, everything else on youtube and sermons on blip.

After doing some research I discovered that the cheapest solution was going to cost anywhere from $200 to $250 a month to host a video sharing site where I could aggregate all of our videos.  All that to say that solution was too expensive so I continued to look for a free solution and found miro community.  Miro Community in my opinions is one of the best ways to aggregate all of your videos into one location without spending an arm and a legg. You can upgrade your miro account for $100 a month and have your own domain if you choose (still cheaper than other solutions).  What I like about Miro is that it pulls the feeds of my youtube, vimeo and blip accounts and allows me to customize the page so that it feels somewhat like our existing website.   You can check out our miro community here.

I have been working on creating a new student ministry website for several months now and finally launched it.  www.lyf.net is the site.  This was the most fun designing a site I have ever had.  The site is easy to navigate, has great content and very easy to update.  What was the trick you might ask….wordpress.

Here are a couple of things I did in designing the site.

1. Bought Headway themes as the primary theme for wordpress.  Best investment our ministry has ever made when it comes to web design. Headway themes allowed us the ability to design the site very easily without having to have a lot of coding knowledge.

2. Downloaded the slickr gallery plugin that pulls flickr images for your photo gallery.  This was a great solution to push our photos onto our website with minimal effort.

3. Moved all of our videos on to external sharing sites such as youtube, vimeo and blip.tv and then pulled them into a video sharing site called Miro Community. Miro allows you to customize the site so it looks similar to your existing website without having to format everything special for flash etc…