"...a huge hit with our congregation."
— Dan Odle What They Say

Blog (Page 13)

A Brazilian Church’s Resurrect-powered Website and Interview with Daniel Gardner

Presentation of Igreja Batista Parque Industrial's Resurrect-powered website

Presentation of Igreja Batista Parque Industrial’s new website

In our first Showcase post, we take a look at how a church in Brazil is using our Resurrect WordPress theme for their new church website.

Daniel Gardner built Igreja Batista no Parque Industrial‘s website and was kind enough to let us interview him. He is part of Ministre, an organization with the goal of helping churches in Brazil build websites and distribute sermons. They contributed the Portuguese translation included with Resurrect and the Church Theme Content plugin that other churches are now benefiting from.

Theme Preview: Exodus, with Wide and Flat Design

Update: Exodus is now available.

Development of our next WordPress theme is underway. We’re calling it Exodus. It has a wide and flat design which you can preview in the screenshot below.

The idea with this theme is to make something with a very different appeal than Resurrect, which was urban-inspired. The design of Exodus is wide, flat and somewhat minimal. We want to offer a variety of themes so that there is something for every church.

Exodus Preview

We’ve Gone Wide and Added More Information

Did you notice our design is a bit wider? That’s the trend these days (and will be true of our future themes). If you’re viewing with a desktop or laptop display having a higher resolution than was previously common, you’ll enjoy greater ease when reading this post, our guides and other content.

Speaking of other content, in addition to this new blog, we also added some more content to the site. We launched with a somewhat minimal website late last year because the priority was to make the Resurrect theme immediately available to churches. Now that the dust from our launch has settled and the making of our second theme is underway, we have a little breathing room, which afforded us some time to beef up the site’s content.

Our Blog Goes Live

We’ve planned on having a blog from the very beginning. You may have seen the unofficial “launch post” for churchthemes.com late last year on my personal blog. If not, give Behind churchthemes.com a read. I was surprised at the feedback I got on that post. It showed me that people want to know what is going on behind a product. I’ve actually had people tell me that post was the reason they decided to buy Resurrect.

My experience with the unofficial “launch post” made me even more excited about starting a blog right here on churchthemes.com. I want this to be a place of connection between us and those who use or are considering using our themes. I also want it to be a continual sneak peek behind the scenes — an ongoing, interactive story — so you always know we’re here, listening and working hard for you. We want your feedback and we want to improve in every way.

So, what will this blog be about, exactly?

WordPress Saves You Money on a Website

A few days ago I was checking up on what some hosted website building services are doing. They’re something like WordPress as far as being “do it yourself” content management systems, but proprietary and hosted by their makers. Some are good solutions. I ran across one that is perhaps good but their marketing strategy was interesting. They had a page detailing all the reasons not to use WordPress, likely because WordPress solutions are significant competition.

I disagreed with much of what was written but one reason in particular stood out — the cost. Their premise was that WordPress is low cost and therefore a low quality solution that should be avoided, lest hidden costs and difficulties arise.

Behind churchthemes.com

Note: This article was originally published on my personal blog. It has since been archived here on the churchthemes.com blog. Read our newer About Us page.

We launched churchthemes.com and the Resurrect WordPress theme earlier this week.

There is not yet a blog at churchthemes.com (it was a greater priority to launch ASAP). If we did have one, I would have made an official-looking launch post. Instead, I want to share here on my personal blog about what’s behind the project. In short, I want to speak my mind about starting a business, development philosophy, pricing models, web hosting and marketing. And I want to tell it a bit like a tale.

It all started about one and a half years ago…

How to Prevent Spam in WordPress

If you’re WordPress site has had a blog for any amount of time then you’ve probably asked your self this question.

What can I do about comment spam?

Automated spam is nothing new and since most WordPress sites allow commenting on at least blog posts, they become a target. Fortunately, there are simple measures that can be taken to keep this from becoming a massive problem. What follows is a three-fold approach that myself and others use to cut out nearly all spam with relatively little effort.

How to embed audio and video players in WordPress

Outdated: The information in this article is outdated. See our Media Embeds guide instead. It shows you how WordPress 5.0’s media embed blocks work.

WordPress 3.6 has been released and one of it’s best new features is the ability to embed audio and video players for uploaded media directly into post or page content. The excellent MediaElement.js JavaScript library is used to output an HTML5 or Flash player, depending on the browser and device, for near-total compatibility. This is a very well-regarded script and is now included in WordPress core for native functionality and for theme/plugin authors to leverage.

In preparing guides for the imminent churchthemes.com launch, I was surprised not to find multiple tutorials explaining to regular users how they can use this new feature. Just this morning I was asked by a customer if it was possible to show a player for an uploaded MP3 file. The answer a few weeks ago would have been to use a plugin. The answer today is yes, WordPress can do that. Here’s how.