mediableep

After months of prayer, research, hard work, and lots of coffee, the brand new Chapel.org is here.

It’s time for me to pass out, but before I do, I’d love to tell you a little more about what I like about it. We can get into process on another post.

1. The team.

This is an important piece that is often overlooked.  In addition to a lot of hours put in by the awesome communications team at The Chapel,  I got to pull a bunch of my buddies together to dream and build, including Eric Murrell — co-contributor  of MediaBLEEP.  The initial graphic design we took and ran with was completed by Rob Palmer, from Branded07.com, in the UK.

We even had folks such as Michael Buckingham, Drew Goodmanson, Kent Shaffer, and John Saddington speak into the site as we were getting the ball rolling.

I never imagined the quality of talent and resources we would have on this project.

2.  ”One call does it all” homepage

Realistically, our analytics from the old site told us what our regular attenders of The Chapel want to see when they come to the website.  We made it easy on them for regular site visits to do what they want to do without having to drill in too deep.

On the homepage, folks can watch the past two weeks of messages, see the latest news, find out what’s coming up, and sign up for the most recent volunteer opportunities.

3.  Open Mic, but not karaoke

Another addition to the homepage is our “Open Mic” section.  Web visitors can interact in the following ways:

• Prayer requests. The 3 latest are displayed, as well as a way to submit prayer requests.
• My Story. This is where we pose a question weekly or monthly, and invite webcam responses.
• Hard Questions. We all have those questions we need answered like, “Did Adam have a bellybutton?”  Actually, that is a bad example, but hopefully you get the point.
• Message Suggestions. This gives folks the opportunity to suggest what they would like to hear more of on the weekends.  In addition, there’s a star rating system attached to it.

4.  The awesomeness that is Chapel Mobile

This is totally Eric Murrell’s baby.  We just told him what we wanted, and he ran with it.  Heck, anyone who would write an eight-part series on building a mobile site is definitely worthy of the calling.

Make sure you give him props on this.

5.  Google Calendar powered events.

Wes Plunk, a good friend and awesome programmer, suggested we have Google Calendar be the back end for our events.

I wasn’t sure how this would work, but I am totally sold now.  I definitely recommend it, and recently found out this is what the digerati uses at LifeChurch.tv to power their events.

Folks can download calendars or events to their outlook, google calendar, or ical.  There’s even a plugin for Facebook fan pages that allow you to Sync google calendar to your facebook events.  More on that next week.

These are just several things I’m digging about the new site.  We welcome your feedback.  Please know it’s still a work-in-progress.