Here is a great website for all of you who wish you were a little more polished on your graphic design skills. This company provides good looking stock layouts that you can purchase and use for a wide array of projects. I have a ministry friend who just used this company to purchase a template for the Sunday Morning Bulletin. If you are interested you can go to www.stocklayouts.com to find out more.

Tags: bulletins, newsletters, church graphics, church graphic design

Yesterday, I gave a top ten list of why you should buy and apple if you are wanting to create a church website yourself. It might help if I give you some background as to why I decided to go on this “apple” tangent. Toward the beginning of the year, the youth pastor of the church community I go to came to me telling me how he had been researching the costs of creating a church website. He has some html knowledge but would be the first to say that he was no web programmer and he did not have the time to learn to be one.

His objective:

- I need it to be quick
- I need it to be easy
- I need it to look good
- and I need it to be cheap

It wasn’t like he wanted much… We went to lunch many times over the website issue and that is about the time I had just purchased my new Intel Core 2 Duo 120GB Hard Drive 2GB Ram Black Macbook….. complete with white apple stickers for my car… I had been looking at iweb and realized it was meeting many of the needs he wanted out of a website. It was easy to use, it was quick to get your website going, the templates looked good and could be modified and compared to the costs of custom web development… It was CHEAP. DING DING… I think we found a winner.

Why do I think iweb is a winner. Here is my list:

1. iweb is based on a “drag and drop” mentality. If you want a picture in a certain place you can drag a picture from your iphoto or another file and it appears where you put it. It works the same way with video… and it even embeds the player automatically. Not to mention it gives you free control to move the video anywhere you want it to be. If you have ever tried to put video into a website using HTML or another form… you know this is a nice, nice feature.

2. iweb is quick. When I said in my last post that you could have a website up in one day; I wasn’t kidding. All you do is add all the pages you want into iweb, put all your pictures, video’s, text, and other stuff in it, and then click on publish. Thats it. Done! You have two options to publish your site. For $99 you can purchase a .mac account and when you click publish… your site is active that minute… no joke! The other option is to publish to a folder and then you can use a ftp editor to move the folder to your own web host. This option is more for the do-it-yourselfer’s out there that want to use there own hosting.

3. iweb looks good. Do I really need to say much here… it’s mac software… everything looks good.

4. Iweb is cheap. Here is the one where most people would try to disagree with me. Yes a macbook or imac will run you close to $1,000. The imac is around $900. But here is what I told my friend… I asked him to give me an estimate of how much time he had spent trying to figure this website thing out. I then asked him to factor in the time it was going to take to learn the software he needed to learn in order to get a website like what he wanted (I’m not talking a cookie cutter website here). Lastly I asked him to factor in the cost of buying the service or software he needed then include the cost of the time I had him think about earlier. Needless to say, $1,000 dollars was cheap compared to what it would really cost to get a website the other way. I think I have him sold on it.

Hopefully this has given you some things to think about when deciding on your next church website. Questions??? Leave a comment and I will get back to you.

If you:

1. Are still trying to figure what the acronym for HTML stands for… use an apple. (by the way it is Hyper Text Markup Language… no I’m not a web programmer… I used Google… and I use a mac:)

2. Have spent the last 7 days trying to find your keyboard under what you think is the top of your desk…. use an apple.

3. Quickly designed the bulletin one week for service and now the congregation thinks your spiritual gift is web design… use an apple.

4. Have found organization is not your friend… use an apple.

5. Think CSS is an old Navy submarine… use an apple.

6. Know the term “Drag and Drop” saved your life on a computer… use an apple.

7. Quickly realized Myspace was not the best choice for a church website… use an apple.

8. Are looking to score an instant 100 “cool points” with your church youth… use an apple.

9. Were quickly educated that custom made websites are not cheap… use an apple.

10. Have spent the last 9 questions trying to figure out what the joke means… use an apple.

Check back in tomorrow and I will show you how an apple can have you a “vicious” looking church website in less than one day… I’m serious… In the mean time I will leave you with some homework… Google iweb and then come back here tomorrow.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Teenagers communicate differently than what we may think. I don’t think email is going away anytime soon. I still communicate with my kids (being my church kids) by using it; but honestly I find that when I instant message with the kids, they seem to have all kinds of stuff to talk about. I guess it is the whole "live" sense of instant messaging that causes them to open up.

It’s all about relationships. From what I’ve seen in youth ministry it seems that kids prefer IM’ing because it’s more like hanging out with friends… We have Internet stations in the youth house and the number one program used is MSN Messenger. I even put some other cool software on the stations, but none of it is used as much as Messenger.

If you haven’t tried the whole IM world of messaging with your teens yet… give it a shot. I have friends who use it as the main method of communicating with their youth. You would be surprised at how quick the word will get around with your teens by using messaging as well. We threw a big event over the summer and decided to use IM’ing as one of our main ways of getting the word out. We told some youth about it the day of or before the event. I was surprised at how many people showed up because of the youth Im’ing each other. Something to think about.

Have you used Instant Messaging to communicate with Youth… tell us about it > be a friend… leave a comment

Creativity is about more than saying the right thing that everyone wants to hear. I see it as being more about discovering. Creativity is discovered. It is pulled out from under some rock in our heads and examined. In many of those creative meeting we had, someone would through out a completely outrageous idea, but it would spark something that was really good. Unless, that person had spoken up and said something, we would have missed the entire opportunity to find a really creative idea.

So, if you have a hard time being creative or getting the "flow" going… keep trying. Look at things differently, try to let your logic and your imagination work together, it will come. If you are still having a hard time take a look at the Church Relevance blog, they had a great article that can help you jump start the creative juices located at this link.

So, basically what happens is when the visitor wakes up in the morning, a youth in this case since Troy is a youth minister, they walk outside to see this little surprise. It’s a very creative way to tell your visitors Thanks! Troy has these signs made out of a inexpensive PVC material. On the front he has placed a clear pocket that lets him put their name on the sign and on the back you can see he will give them a food coupon if they come back next week. I will post here again soon with information on where to purchase these signs. In the meantime, if you have any creative ideas that you use in ministry, post a comment and let us know about them.

- Learn more about Nspire church software by going to www.nspiresoftware.com -

If you haven’t heard of Serendipity House it is an excellent resource for Sunday School, small group, or general meetings. I found out about Serendipity House from a Youth Specialties show I was working at. They had a free lesson from their Flood series that included some of the best DVD video work I have seen in a long time. This immediately caught my attention that they were doing something different from the norm. The curriculum is not shallow but is not so deep that no one is able to get it. As far as offerings, they have something for everyone. From first look, everything looks "youthy" but the material for adults and small groups is good enough for either of these groups.

I personally use the Flood series for my youth services that I teach. If you like video resources that link in with solid curriculum, I would recommend checking out this series (Flood). The youth really like the video’s that are included. Every lesson has a high quality service starter pre-made for you that carries the theme of the service into the service starter. All I can say was I was very impressed with the attention to detail the writers at Serendipity put into this and their other curriculum. It is definitely worth taking a look at.

- Do you have resources you use that could benefit other churches? Post a comment to this post to tell us about them.