mission.japan

Seeing as much of my professional work experience is in web design and development, it makes sense that one of my hats in Japan is to work on the church web site. Currently Pastor Goto handles the web site, which you can see at http://www.geocities.jp/tsushimachurch.

A few weeks ago David talked with me about some of the ideas that are floating around for the church’s web site. Interestingly enough, a few days after our conversation he read an article in Evangelical Missions Quarterly that talked about church web sites in the mission field. Obviously a web site has a big potential for keeping everyone in the church updated on the latest news, but it can also be a tool for bringing people into the church. For whatever reason (this is heard from fellow missionaries), churches with nice web sites tend to get more new people.

For the time being I will use my server to test out the site, so you can see what I’ve done so far by going to http://tsushima.deltafour.net/. Whether the site stays on my server (a very real possibility if we need content management like Textpattern) is still unknown.

The first part of reworking the church web site will be the design, which is pretty much done. The current site has a mishmash of stylings and no standards compliance. I kept the rainbow theme for the navigation at the top, but pretty much everything else went out the window in favor of a (comparatively) toned down design. The second half of things will be moving all of the content from the old site to the new site. I’m still in the middle of this, so there are plenty of 404s at this point. For the most part it’s simple work, but you never really know how many pages a site has until you redesign it.