Nearby military installations are bringing in hundreds of new people to the area in the next five years. Those people will be looking for places to go to church, buy groceries, bank, get their hair cut, have their nails done, rent movies, and take their families to celebrate when they get a promotion or finish a project. They'll be looking for people to care for their lawns or their pets or their children, to entertain them, to change their oil, to press their suits, to do their taxes, to keep their cars and houses clean, to fix the pipes or the wiring or the HVAC system, and to keep bugs from taking over their houses. They'll also be looking for opportunities to socialize, to have fun, and to get involved to make a difference.

Will any of these new people in the area be able to find your church, business, or organization on the World Wide Web? Having a Web site is critical for every church or business, no matter how small. It is one of the most cost-efficient forms of advertisement, and it gives you exposure 24 hours a day. If you don't have at least the information on your business cards available on the Web, you are ignoring a huge avenue for reaching potential visitors, members, or customers.

People moving to the area are checking online to see what they'll find when they get here. Can they find you on the Web?

Now is the perfect time to build a new site or update an existing one.

That depends on what you commit to the effort and what you want to achieve:

There are many design principles that will make your site more effective, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing. Some of these principles are intuitive, and people from all disciplines can easily apply them. Others are not readily obvious but still important, both for generating positive feelings in your visitors and for avoiding negative reactions. A designer has training and/or experience with both kinds of design principles.

Another important consideration is whether you want your Web site, which may be the first impression your visitors get of you and your organization, to reflect the touch of a professional or the uncoordinated raw materials of a twenty-dollar clipart collection. Paying a bundle doesn't always help, but you don't often get more than you pay for.

I'm a Christian. I'm a Web designer focusing on Web design for churches. I'm a graduate of UWF with a BA in Communication Arts. I have training in copy editing, design, HTML and CSS. I have maintained Web sites for over ten years.

Unique needs

While some people might think a church Web site should be just like any other Web site, I believe that church sites should be different. This is not just because the needs of visitors to church Web sites are different, but also because churches approach the Web and are usually structured in a way that requires a different method than that used by most other Web content producers.

Good stewardship

Many churches, particularly small churches, have been given the impression from well-meaning or unscrupulous people that their Web sites need to be full-fledged Web-based ministries.

In fact, as Dean Peters points out on http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/, "For the most part, people aren't seeking the church experience online - rather they are shopping online for a real-world church experience."

Further the Gospel

I offer my services to churches in hopes that they will be able to form a meaningful site that meets the needs of its visitors and doesn't waste the Lord's resouces by hosting unnecessary images and decorative content. I offer my services to help churches be good stewards of what God has provided for the purpose of making visitors to their Web sites visitors to their churches.

Custom design

As part of my services, I will meet with representatives of your church to develop a clear plan, develop a clean and individualized template specifically for your church, and train them to maintain the Web site I build.

Lower maintenance budget

Because the representatives of your church will be trained how to use the tools of the Web, your church will be empowered to run its own Web site, leaving resources that would otherwise go to paying an outside contractor free for use in other areas, or for the addition of new content or new forms of content to the Web site.

Appropriate technology

Since I will meet with your church's representatives, I will learn what your church's needs are. I won't try to sell you a package site that is not right for your needs. Small churches might need only a digital business card type of page. Larger churches might need a full-fledged Web ministry. I won't try to sell a ministry to the small church, and I won't load either one down with unneeded gimmicks and chrome.

The beauty of template-based designs is that they easily fit around or integrate into other systems, such as a shopping-cart backend or a content management system (CMS), even though Web development (building the actual backends) is outside the scope of the professional services I normally offer. Fitting server-side content into a page can be done by either dropping the Web application's code into areas of the template or by breaking the template into hypertext fragment files for the application to display around its content.

Either way, my designs can seamlessly integrate with most Web applications.

Regarding forums, there are numerous forum hosts on the Web, many of them offering free services. A link to your forum can certainly be included on your pages, and in some cases, the forums can be easily wrapped in your layout or displayed with your branding.

You can see my work at full size on these sites:

• Skreyola's Drailen (A writer's personal site)
• Baker, FL, UMC
• Florida SunCo's Xolarator™ solar pool heating

Here are some sample site layouts I've developed. They are skeletons, mere frameworks from which to build a real site, rather than actual pages from a real Web site. Still, they give a sense of some of the many things that are possible with XHTML/CSS-based accessible code.

If you already have a Web site, I'll review your site and send you an e-mail report on its condition with a recommendation for free.

I am willing to do business and personal sites. Churches get lower rates than non-churches, but send me an e-mail to negotiate a price. I reserve the right to refuse the patronage of any person or organization, at my own discretion.

Some Web design firms offer package prices for a Web site with a certain number of pages. That's fine, but I prefer to design your Web site from scratch, and there is no way to predict how long that will take. In order to be fair to both your church and myself, so that neither of us has to absorb the cost of an inaccurate estimate of how long the site takes, I prefer to work on an hourly basis. I don't want to give you a site based on one of five pre-formatted templates. I also don't wish to limit your church to having a five-page site like some other designers sell. I want your church to have the site that is the right size and design for the needs of your church. However, if you would prefer to work within a set budget, I can give you a quote on that basis.

I don't have a fixed price for my services, because I prefer to negotiate on an individual basis, but the general starting point for these negotiations for design, coding, and training is $40/hr. for commercial or personal sites. Christian churches get a discount of at least 10% of this rate. I do not charge an extra 'setup fee' for starting your account.

Because I specialize in Web design (the front-end layout and design) for churches and wish to offer these services at a low price, Web development (programming of back-end scripts or Flash) will be charged at a higher rate than what we negotiate for design and related services.

Special rates are available for small churches, including a free option.

Start the negotiations right now by sending me an e-mail at less than or equal at cox dot net. You can be sure an e-mail has come from me by checking the digital signature against my public key. You can also use this key to encrypt messages and files you send to me to ensure your privacy.

Among the special rates available for small churches is a free option. However, nothing comes without cost. In this case, the cost is choices (and a text link advertising my service). The free site is a single-page digital business card, and I will decide the layout. You can pick some colors and provide some specific images to fill my layout.

If you wish to pay a little, you will have more options, but I offer this free service for those churches looking to get started with the bare minimum.

Here are some links to resources your church might find useful. Unless otherwise noted, there is no affiliation between these external sites and LWSD. LSWD is not responsible for the content on sites it does not control.

Web Stewardship and Sensible Design - An online column about Web design and stewardship.

The Upper Room - Online devotionals and site drop-ins.

Chili Pepper of the Web - An article about using animation.

Section 508 - Accessibility information. @Wikipedia

The ADA of 1990 - Accessibility information. @Wikipedia

Holy Land Photos - Free photos of the Holy Land.

StuffICanUse.com - Free ministry resources.

ComeToOurChurch.com - Church locator.

Wycliffe Kids Web - Children's Pages.

10 questions to ask when considering Open Source solutions - Good article at 10Things.

MP3 Audio Bible (KJV) - Available for download or listening online.

Skreyola's church resources list - A bookmark list of resources, updated occasionally. @Delicious