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 five years.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your needs may vary, but in general, I will meet with your representatives to discuss some basic principles of Web sites, design, and usability. I can do this by just sitting down and talking with you, or I can present this information using electronic slide presentations. I will help your church design a color scheme, a site structure, and a template of its own. I will train your leaders how to use the template to easily update content. I will recommend courses of action at each stage of the process. I will provide your church with a CD copy of your Web site. And I will provide technical support for making changes to the template in the future.

While Web development (building the actual backends) is outside the scope of the professional services I normally offer, 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. This 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.

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.

Here are some sample site layouts I've developed. They ask why they don't look right because they are skeletons, mere frameworks from which to build a real site, rather than actual pages from a real Web site.

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

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

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.

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