I have been doing volunteer ministry in the communications department at Granger for over two years now. It began with basic web maintenance and some simple graphic design work and has blossomed into two full-blown websites complete with dynamic back-end administration panels, integration with the current CMS used by the church, flash navigation, flash feature sections on main and series pages, and media features that are taking us to entirely new heights.

It has been awesome to work with the team on these projects and peer into the future together. But from now on it will be from a slightly different perspective.

I recently began talks with the Administrative Pastor (Tony Morgan) about what it would look like to actually move into full time ministry at the church. This would mean leaving a career in the mental health field to do something totally different.

After much prayer, personal reflection (and of course conversations with my wife) I (we) accepted the position as Web Director at the church.

My first day at the church will be September 5th.

On one hand this is just a continuation of my two years of ministry. But on the other hand it is a brand new adventure - an incredible opportunity that I believe God was preparing me for with years of leading, teaching and testing.

I'm looking forward to this next leg of the journey!

New Look

You might be asking yourself why the site looks so different. Well, lets just say I thought a small face lift was in order to celebrate the transition. Hope you like it!

I was reviewing local and regional stats on the use of dial-up versus broadband recently and was surprised to see that the percentage of broadband users was less than 30%!

My mind started racing with questions about our site, the target audience, the pageloads, our optimization practices with both images and flash elements, etc. I emailed a few people on the team and ran some questions by them. And when it was all said and done, we'd dotted all the "i's" and crossed all the "t's."

You see as it turns out, our site (gccwired.com) is still accessible to dial-up users (though I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to view video clips in the media player) so no one is being excluded.
Also, our target audience is much more likely to use broadband that dial-up regardless what the regional stats are showing.

Because of this, we have chosen to design the site with the broadband user in mind. This allows greater flexibility in the technologies used and allows us to keep our sites fixed on cutting edge technology as we strive for excellence in web communications.

With HD on the horizon and other more interactive web applications popping up every day, the future is looking bright. Better get my shades...

Tony Morgan, Administrative Pastor at Granger Community Church and one of the Simply Strategic Guys, put it this way: