DouglasWard.net Random ramblings from an IT Director

Derek Leek & Douglas Ward Leading A Technology Workshop

Derek Leek (Conference Webmaster) and I were able to lead a technology workshop last week during annual conference.  The title of the workshop was “Web Prescense, Web Schmesence.  What the heck is a website and why do I need it?”  We had a very interesting discussion with approximately 75 clergy, laity and a few conference staff people.

The discussion centered mainly on the latest blogging/website platforms.  We showed the audience how easy it is to create a professional looking website using tools such as Blogger and WordPress.  E-mail, document collaboration and shared calendaring was discussed via Google Apps.  All of these solutions are free and relatively easy to set up and use.

Derek unveiled our new web hosting plan also.  We can now host WordPress blogs for our local churches on our new WordPress-MU installation.  Full domain names can be mapped to the subdomain on our server.  Blogs can be set up at http://www.nccumc.net.

We are very excited about this new ministry opportunity.  It is critically important that our local churches start reaching out to their community where they live.  If we do not adopt the language of the people we will lose them.  Hopefully we can start taking this presentation on the road and start meeting people.  Overall it was a great workshop and we received excellent feedback.  I hope we can do it again soon!