After several months of planning and developing, my church’s website finally went live yesterday. Last Fall, I was approached by our church’s promotions team about creating a new web presence for the church. (Someone must have told them that I design websites for a living.) At the time, the site was a bit out dated because it was difficult to maintain. It was also nothing more than a basic informational website.

Being a Joomla guy, I immediately began brainstorming ideas for improving the functionality of the site. I knew right away that I wanted to use Community Builder to build a social networking site. The great thing about building a church website is that there is already a built-in community. The website just helps to facilitate that community by providing another outlet for social interaction. In other words, I don’t have to build a community from scratch, but I just have to give the existing community a place to “hang out” on the internet.

I won’t go into all of the nerdy details of how the site was built, but I will give a list of the extensions I used:

• Template: Custom
• Components: Community Builder, Group Jive, uddeIM, sh404SEF, EventList, JoomlaXplorer
• Modules: Extended Menu, Latest Events, Group Jive Newest Groups, s4j Newest Users, Rok Slideshow

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them, and I’ll do my best to answer them. Here is a link to the site: Harris Creek Baptist Church.