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10 Reasons to host your church website with WordPress

I’m often coaching churches with their websites. Most churches these days have a website. But the majority of churches have a website that is out of date and nearly unused.

That’s a shame.

Almost everyone these days will likely look for your website before they plan their first visit to your church. Even if it’s only to check the service times.

A church told me recently that they had a visitor who came to their church over all the other churches in their community because when they looked at church websites in their community theirs was the only one with easy-to-find service times. [Read more…]

7 Powerful Information Management Tools

I used to be a saver, meaning, I saved everything. It finally hit me the last time we moved, over 9 years ago thankfully, that I was having a hard time letting go of stuff. As I was loading the truck I realized we were moving boxes that had remained unopened since our last move over 3 years earlier.

That kind of “save everything” thinking has also shown up in how I do my work. Piles of paper, boxes, and shelves full of books, notes stuck all over, all this could easily overtake my workspace if it weren’t for the help I get from a bit of technology. [Read more…]

Free Web Hosting for Your Sermons – Your Sermons in the Cloud

Free Web Hosting for Your Sermons Your Sermons in the Cloud

Several years ago I recommended here hosting sermon audio in the cloud for free at SermonCloud.com. They no longer offer from sermon audio hosting but there are other options now.

Two services I recommend these days are Achor.fm and Archive.org.

As a web developer especially interested in helping churches for many years now I’m often asked “how do I add audio to our church website?” [Read more…]

Productivity One-Liners

You look like you could use 40 tips on productivity.

Here are six to get you started.

Work expands to fill the time you give it.
Perfection is productivity’s nemesis.
The secret to productivity? Do what you avoid.
The more decisions you remove, the more progress you make.
Busy is not productive.
People who do the most rarely do the best.

I usually look at stuff like this when I’m procrastinating. You too?

How to Get Notification of WordPress and Plugin Updates

Have you ever wanted a way to be notified when there’s a WordPress update available or there’s a plugin on your WordPress powered website that’s in need of updating?

With WordPress in use on an estimated 60% of all websites worldwide, it is a prime target for attack. There will always be bad actors trying to find and exploit any weakness they can use to their advantage.

Whether there’s a weakness in the WordPress code or a flaw in one of the many plugins for WordPress there will always be risks. But the risks can be minimized. [Read more…]

How to Restore Data from iCloud

If you’re an iCloud user this helpful article will be worth your time.

iCloud, however, much like real clouds, is notoriously opaque. It’s hard to see just what you have stored in it. Nonetheless, Apple has made it easy, at least, to fix some truth-related issues in iCloud, and you can do it with a readily accessible tool: a Web browser on any Mac or PC.

Check it out if for no other reason than to give you a little peace-of-mind that you’ll be able to get your data if you need it.

Moving Your Data From Evernote to Google Drive with CloudHQ

Evernote has been a tool I use every day for about three years. I love Evernote. Trouble is I’ve treated is as my digital filing cabinet for everything. PDFs, Word documents, web development information, records, scans, photos of important documents and much more.

[Read more…]

How To Edit Jetpack infinite scroll footer text on Genesis Themes

Infinite scroll on websites is becoming more common and is a clever and effective method for retaining site visitors. With infinite scroll there’s no longer a need to click the previous or next archive pagination links.

With the Jetpack plugin thankfully there’s a one-click method of activating infinite scroll on your self hosted WordPress powered site. But if you’re using the Genesis Theme Framework, as I am these days on all the sites I develop, when you try to activate infinite scroll you may receive a polite message which states that your theme isn’t compatible with the infinite scroll feature. Our you may not receive an error message but infinite scroll just won’t work.

By the way, if you aren’t using Genesis Theme Framework and a Genesis Theme, you should be, get the framework and a theme here.

[Read more…]

How To Add A Read More Link to Genesis Child Theme Excerpts

Using the Genesis Theme Framework is a huge help when setting up, customizing and maintaining a WordPress powered website. But sometimes the default settings won’t quite meet your requirements.

Recently while customizing a Genesis Child Theme for a client’s website, in the theme settings I had set the Content Archives to Display post excerpts. But when viewing the post archives the excerpts did not have a “Read More” link like the client wanted. [Read more…]

My Number 1 WordPress web development tip

Here’s my number 1 WordPress web development tip — install WordPress locally.

Want to develop websites faster? Start using WordPress. Maybe that should be my number one tip. But in my opinion, to best build and prepare a website for deployment you’ll be much happier working on the site if it’s running an a WordPress install that’s running on your own machine.

If you’re using a Mac check out this very thorough and helpful tutorial over at WPCandy.com on How to install WordPress locally on a Mac.

If you’re using a PC then I’d suggest using this BitNami WordPress stack to install WordPress locally.

When you’re ready to move your WordPress site to the web server WPCandy.com has help for that too.