The folks over at Friends Church in Yorba Linda have put together a great resource on their SnapShot Website for Thanksgiving week.  Each day this week, they will be posting something new to their Gratitude Initiative page.  Each post will include four things:

1. a theme that includes a song to listen to
2. a scripture to read
3. a prayer to pray
4. an action-step to take

They've included options for sharing via twitter and email as well as a way to add comments.  Check out what they've got going on and share something you are thankful for this week.

What do think should be included on the home page of your church website?  How should it be displayed?  What options for connection should be most obvious?  What are your goals when setting up your home page? How effective is your home page?  How do you measure it's effectiveness?  Check out what the folks at East Valley Nazarene have done with their homepage.  It's simple and beautiful and I think you are going to love it.

The folks at NorthPoint Church have done a great job communicating to their community with their e-newsletter.  Here are a few things we love about it:

1. Great Content - Each newsletter includes a personal reflection from one of the church staff.  It's typically a few paragraphs long.  It's sometimes informational and other times inspirational.  
    
2. Upcoming Events - They included a simple list of upcoming events.  The list includes dates, times, locations, and links for more info.  It's just enough to inform but not overwhelm.
    
3. Options for Connection - They provide obvious links to connect on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and email.  They also have their service times and a link to a map prominantly displayed.
    
4. Clear and Beautiful Layout - They layout the newsletter to match their website's look and feel.  It's clean and simple, and it's great branding.
    
5. One Click Share Options - When viewing the newsletter in a browser, you can share it via Facebook, Twitter, or Google + wtih a simple click.

What are you doing to communicate with your people?  Are you using e-newsletter?  Has it been effective?  

 After the last blog post on getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick, some of you have asked for a picture of the stick.  Instead of just a picture, I taken a quick video.  It's a pretty gnarly looking branch.  Take a look.

I'm a runner.  For the past few years, I have been enjoying early morning runs.  When I say early morning, I'm talking 4:30 or 5:00.  Yes it's dark, but since there are so few cars on the road and I can see their headlights from quite a distance away, I have found that I can feel safe running right in the middle of the road and relying moonlight.  This plan has worked flawlessly hundreds of times.  Then there was Monday.

I was 7 miles into a 10 miler when a car started coming towards me.  I moved to the left shoulder of the road but didn't slow down.  Then it hit me.  Not the car, thank goodness.  No it was a branch sticking out into the bike lane.  I didn't see it coming so I didn't flinch or close my eye.  I just hit it head on with an open eye.  After curling up in a ball on the side of the road for a few minutes, I got up and ran home so my wife could take me to the ER.  I learned a few things this week:

1. When you are running in the dark and you see a car driving towards you, just stop and get out of the way.  Yes, this will knock a few seconds off your pace but it'll be better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
2. When you are running in the dark, carry a cell phone.  This way, if something tragic does happen, you can call for a ride instead of having to run 3 miles home while blotting blood off your face and wondering exactly where that blood is coming from.
3. When the guy taking your info at the ER asks "On a scale of one to ten, how bad is the pain?" he wants you to give him a number.  I responded with "Well, it's pretty bad but I guess it could be a lot worse." I wasn't thinking straight and he let me know that by rolling his eyes and repeating "On a scale of one to ten…"
4. Don't bring your kids to the Emergency Room.  After a few eye tests and a CT Scan, I was in the ER waiting room when my wife showed up with our two youngest kids.  I was delighted to see them but the looks we received from other patients made it clear that others weren't as excited to have a 3 year old and a 1 year old running around the waiting room.  They left quickly.
5. Neon yellow snot isn't necessarily reason for alarm.  It turns out that certain eye drops will do this to you (or so I was told after a frantic call to the doctor).
6. Having a big puffy eye can be socially awkward.  You can either ease the awkwardness by explaining what happened or enhance the awkwardness by responding to the quizzical looks with "What? Do I have something on my face?"

Most of what we do every day at SnapShot Web could be described as helping churches, ministries, and sometimes small businesses get setup with affordable, great looking, very robust, and easy to manage websites.  When we set up a new website, I always tell customers and potential customers that the templates we start with are fully customizable.  What this means is that you can simply look for the website template that's closest to what you have in mind and we'll help you make changes to the images, colors, layout, etc. so that it's a perfect fit for what you are looking for.  That's most of what we do.

Occassionally though (it's actually becoming rather frequent) we'll have someone approach us with the website design already complete.  Not only do they know exactly what they are looking for but they have the design already packaged in layered Photoshop file.  These people want us to do two things for them:

1. Take their design and make it work - make the rollover images work, program the dropdown menus, add links, videos, mp3s, slideshows, etc.
2. Set it up in such a way that they can easily manage it themselves - this way they don't have to pay or wait every time they want to add a new page or update content.

We recently finished a custom project in this arena at live.simplyyouthministry.com and I thought you might like to check it out.  Click around the site and let us know what you think.  We've got a handful of others that I'll post on the blog in the coming weeks. 

Aliso Creek Presbyterian Church has put together a custom church website using the SnapShot Web tools.  One thing that you'll notice as you click through their church website is that they have some amazing and powerful photographs on every page.  These aren't your typical stock photos of generic smiling families.  Instead, they hired a local photographer to come out to their church and take some shots of people in their community.

The effect of a few good photos for your church website is priceless.  Take a look at www.acpc.net and let us know what you think.

The good folks at Trinity United Methodist Church in Elkhart, IN have had a SnapShot Website for their church for the last 5 years.  Just this past month though, they decided it was time for a major redesign of this church website. Since they are using the SnapShot tools to manage their site, the entire redisign process took only a matter of hours as they switched to a different template, make a few custom changes to the new template, then clicked through each page of their site to make sure everything was in place.

Check out the new look and feel at www.3umc.org.

We recently interviewed Justin Davis, the Student Pastor and the Pastor's assistant at The Pentecostals of Pasadena about their new church website - www.thepopchurch.org.

Here are some of the highlights from the interview:

SnapShot Web: Tell us a little about The Pentecostals of Pasadena.

Justin Davis: Our church has been in Pasadena for 58 years.  In September 2008 our church was severely damaged during hurricane Ike, and we were displaced for 2 ½ years.  Several months ago we finally made it back home to our church building. Everything is new and improved, and we felt like our website needed to be new and improved as well.

SSW: We've seen the new site.  It looks awesome.  How much time do you spend working on your website each week? What changes do you make regularly?

JD: Time spent updating the site every week is a minimum, maybe 3 hours.  And that includes updating our podcast with our latest services on Monday and Thursday.  I also make any changes to the calendar that are needed.

SSW: What kind of feedback have you received from people in your church or community?

JD: Feedback from our church was been great.  The Sermon Archive is particularly popular, especially during a sermon series where you want to catch every message.  They also love having the church calendar online. We pass out year long calendars at the beginning of the year.  But, as always happens dates/times get changed, new events are planned.  With the online calendar it is being updated weekly and everyone is aware of upcoming events.

SSW: Now that you have worked with the SnapShot Tools a bit, If you could share one or two tips or tricks with others who are new to  the SnapShot Web world, what would they be?  

JD: Two words:  Recurring Events.  The initial setup of the calendar was time consuming, but every month got easier, due to the recurring events already being populated.  Also, I spent quite a bit of time reviewing the tutorials that are available.

SSW: Has this been a solo endeaver of have you gotten others involved in the website (either through editing the site or interacting in some other way)?

JD: We have a graphic artist in the church who supplied the slides for our home page slide show.  She keeps them updated with our upcoming events.

SSW: Anything else you'd like to say?

JD: I am extremely impressed with Snapshot Web, the product and the people.  Because they specialize in church websites, they had a module created for everything we wanted.  And most of it came pre-loaded on the site, we just had to edit it.  I have made several calls to them and they spent time to walk me through different questions I had, and made some changes to the site for me. This is their business, but it seems they are approaching it with the heart of ministry.

SSW: What do we owe you for that last statment and where can we send the check.  Just Kidding.  Thanks for the kind words.

The fine folks at Yorba Linda Friends Church recently launched a custom SnapShot Website.  When the new site launched, they put out a pretty great video to announce it.  They've done it again.  This time they have set up an amazing mobile app for Apple, Android, and Blackberry through the R04R promo.  You can check out the mobile app at friendschurchyl.com/mobile.

Just like last time, they put together a slick video to announce the app to their community and the world.

Want to setup a mobile presence for your church?  Sign up today.