Pagelines is by far my favorite wordpress theme.  I have used this drag and drop framework to build more than 7 websites in the last year.  Recently pagelines has updated their system to 2.0, which means better customization and a new store with specialized plugins coming soon.

Google Apps for non-profits allows you up to 25 users before you have to pay a dime. What's great about google apps is that you can share multiple calendars all within a single window, manage email, documents and more. Share vacations schedules, meetings and more with google's calendar and stop killing trees.

I just installed postie, a wordpress plug-in on this blog to make it easier for me to post. All I have to do now is send an email to a secret email address and bang I posted. I have found that when it's really cumbersome to login and update things I never get around to posting.

1. Hosts such as Dreamhost allow you to install the cms in one-simple click
2. Really cool themes like Pagelines end up looking like a website not a blog
3. Its so easy to update…..that you can train practically anyone
4. Tons of free and paid plug-ins that allow you to customize your site with ease
5. Websites are no longer as popular as facebook….so why spend a time of money on a complicated website when you can create a clean/simple blog?
6. Because Drupal and other CMS programs have a steep learning curve and require the continual paid services of someone who knows what they are doing
7. If you don’t believe me check out these sites I have created in wordpress and be re-assured | servantleadershipexperience.org | lorrenholliday.com | lyf.net

I love wordpress and especially the ability to design and develop a site without having to really know a ton of coding.  Recently I ran across a company called pagelines, which is similar to headway themes in that both are a cms for wordpress. After using both themes, I have quickly fallen love with pagelines because of its stability and look and feel.  You can check out the site that I am currently developing here.  Bottom line, if you need to develop a good looking website without spending a ton of money, then purchase a wordpress theme.  Oh….and if you want to be able to customize it a ton…..its probably easier to purchase a cms wordpress theme like pagelines or headway….just sayin.

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…

You can create a google form in a matter of minutes and the great thing about google is that its free.  When creating a google form you have the option to embed it into your current website or link directly to the form itself.  Another benefit to using google forms is that it allows you the opportunity to be notified via email every time someone submits an entry as well as being able to view all the results in an excel file that you can share easily with others.

Here are the steps I used to create the page:
1. Create a facebook page
2. Get 25 fans
2. Once you have 25 fans go to facebook.com/username and change the url so that your page has an actual url you can advertise
4. Search fbml and click add fbml to my page
5. Develop your html document in dreamweaver or another web development program
6. Upload any images you are using to outside service such as flickr or a web server
7. Replace the path of the images with the outside path you created
8. Go into your code and copy from table to table (the max width is 790)
9. Go to your facebook page and edit the page
10. Edit the fbml and past the code in there
11. Once your code is pasted you can go to your wall settings and make that fbml page be your landing page if you so desire