Announcing Innocents: A Blog, a webblog for Holy Innocents Episcopal Church.
If you take a look at it, you’ll see that there are static content pages off of the “breadcrumbs” menu, corresponding to pages on the “main” church website. In the next few days, I will gradually be shifting all of the content over from there into Moveable Type (MT). And not using Front Page (MS). Ever again.
And yes, I’ve been a-hankering to do this for a while. I’ve decided that the blog part of the site will be integral; categories will be used for blog-like entries for things like committee news, lay ministries and scheduling, church school stuff, and so on. Currently, I’m posting all the entries I have in “Main,” as it’s functioning like a report of that Sunday’s doings (with pictures, when possible). I suppose wth the categories, it could work like a monthly bulletin that we used to have, now that I think about it.
I can’t really say why exactly I hated working with Front Page, except that I found it clunky and confusing and all the stuff I needed to do was buried on some tab of a sub-category dialogue box, and when I looked at the “HTML” (or what they chose to show me, since much of it was tactfully hidden away somewhere) I was horrified.
Tonight for the first time with Front Page, I tried to do a simple bit of CSS to add a simple border to images that ought to have worked across-the-board, but when I got into it, I realized it was strictly on a page-by-page basis. And the thought of doing this every time was maddening, and apparently the only way to do it globally is to write up an external CSS file. I had previously been adding drop shadows for the church website in Photoshop, but I’m much happier with the look of the CSS-created drop shadows that I finally got working at this site.
Okay, well, that wasn’t happening. So it was actually easier to start tinkering with the test blog I’d put together for the church and add static pages. Images, of course, were a lot easier to deal with.
The fun part was figuring out how to do the menu; I’m pretty happy with the simple background style that gives a faux-tab effect.
For the moment, comments will be disabled. I’d have to get MT-Blacklist installed over there.
I’ll be curious to know what other Episcopal bloggers will think of the project, such as AKMA, Fr. Salty, and ***Dave.
Looks great, Ted, except I’d upgrade to MT 3 as soon as you can (it’s not too difficult, and improvements across the whole application amply justify the upgrade).
This is just the way a congregation should be using MT, a wonderful example. My only critical comment would be that people with strong eyesight typically underestimate how difficult it is to read grey text. The body copy’s grey is still legible, but (especially) some of your sidebar copy is so faint that it risks vanishing altogether. I’d definitely opt for a darker shade in both instances. Your choice of a color spectrum is intriguing; is that an organized array of color choices, or are you picking colors on an ad hoc basis?
That, and the “Main” link returns a 404.
Thank you for the helpful comment, Father (actually, I’m doing the blogging for the church website for now, too).
I’ll adjust the font colors as soon as I can. I think I also have to do some tweaking so that the calendar isn’t so likely to vanish. And you found one of the busted links! I really shouldn’t have been tinkering around with it until the wee hours last night.
Fr. Ted isn’t yet convinced of the usefulness of a blog, so the main selling point is making the church website more attractive.
Noted on the upgrade to MT3.x. I haven’t done it here because, frankly, I’m spooked by the prospect. However, I’ll consult with the in-house geek on the matter.
As for color choice for the Holy Innocents blog, our colors are red and white, and the church doors are bright red. I may dial the banner color back to something a little less vivid, though.