RiverLife Community Churchis the result of the merger in the summer of 2011 of North Shore Baptist Church and Bli Bli Community Baptist Church. The initial connection between Small Beginnings and Pastor Rob Rodgers was made by my great mate Bill Joukhadar when they had been discussing small groups for Rob’s church. Subsequently Rob contacted me to help them develop a new logo for the new merged church, RiverLife Community Church, and we are still working through that design progress – we are close but not there yet!
As we went through that process Rob said that he wanted to build a new website for the new church and after we had discussed some options by email he asked me to take on the project – and of course I was delighted to do so. The project will be reflecting the whole new identity of the church, it’s vision and mission – so they are developing all new content for the website. We are also integrating some social networking using Facebook, YouTube and their existing PodBean account that they use for their sermon podcasts. I am also going to be helping them to increase the Search Engine results – not on a long term basis but initially to try and get them well up in the results for a few key search phrases. I enjoy the SEO work but it is very time consuming and I don’t have the patience to do it full-time, that’s for sure!
Rob and Shelley have chosen the Authentic Theme from Organized Themes for their new website build. This is a fairly straightforward theme, nice and clean, with some good features specifically for churches – not of all of which we will be using, such as the podcasts. I was surprised that it was missing something that is becoming increasingly common in wordpress themes, a built-in contact form (not that this is a problem as there are plenty of great plug-ins for that). It also has a Facebook template that will enable us to design and install a themed front page on the RiverLife Community Church facebook page. I haven’t got that to work yet but we will get there!
Shelley, who is managing the project, is very enthusiastic and responsive – she’s also not afraid to ‘have a go’ designing the artwork and is keen to learn how to actually manage the website on a day-to-day basis – which is great to know and I hope it won’t be too long before we have got all the content up and can start training Shelley to take it all over. They are doing a great job in this project and I am really enjoying it!
Go take a look at the work in progress!
