ITS finally here! Our new and much better looking website is now available for everyone. Its almost exactly one year since we first launched WIN Ireland’s first ever website. For those who have not seen how it looked see the image below. Its been quite a blessed journey discovering and creating the “life” of the Church through the technology of the Internet. About 12 months ago the website’s domain “wordinternationalireland.com” was born and generously given for free by my work colleague who has been doing this business on the side. James Osborne who is based in Sydney Australia is our web host provider as well through his company Aztecwebdesigns has been supporting our church for free and since over a year ago and has been instrumental in providing the webdesign tools and configurations to make it possible for us to launch a more robust and feature packed website.
I would like to thank those who have provided inspiration for the new site and I’m blessed that our Lord has been gracious on all our endeavors through the support of our brethren to promote our church and its activities in the internet. We are now formally launching the 2nd release of the WORD International Ministries Ireland Official Website. This website is powered by WORDPress which is an open source website discovery and delivery system that provides virtually limitless options to increase the site’s functionality. Through the power of modern web designing tools like plug-ins we are able to provide many more church beneficial and cost free web based services which our ministries can use to further the Kingdom in the service of our Lord.
I’m glad to summarize, some of the new features that the website can provide, namely:
1. Easy Readable Magazine Format – this is like having an electronic version of our Quarterly Newsletter Reaching Out. Each post or article can be categorized under a Feature or a What’s On. A rolling mechanism allows articles to be moved from Headlilne, Popular to Latest. Its much easy to find what you need to read.
2. Hierarchical Menu Format – Now you can see all the different Ministries and other kinds of pages under new drop down menu system that allows the brethren to find what they are looking for within top menu’s to ‘child’ menus and so on.
3. Built in Picture Gallery – The brethren can also view admin uploaded pictures and hopefully soon there will be provision to allow others to upload pictures. The pictures are then randomly shown in a gallery slideshow.
4. Announcement Ticker and Upcoming Events Calendar – There are now many ways we can remind the brethren about church activities and other reminders. Any church event can now be entered within the site to automatically display from 3 previous past events to 3 future upcoming events. A regular blinking announcement can also be displayed for specific kinds of announcements that immediately catches the attention on first glance.
5. Bible Verse and Motivational Quote of the Hour/ Day – This is a nice and easy way to get to read some random bible (NIV) verse and motivational quotes from notable men and women whenever you browse into the website.
6. 3-Day Dublin Weather Forcast– What better way to know what to bring or prepare when going to Church by knowing the weather forcast. This is available via Google weather.
7. Fast Contact Forms – One of the most important improvements in our website is to allow the brethren to submit forms that will be sent to targetted email addresses in confidenc. This could be about someone who is new to the church to request to be contacted or visited (Contact Us), sending a Prayer Request from the website, joining a Care Group or even submitting an Online Registration to an event like the Family Camp.
8. Easy Social Networking Sharing Option – Every page in the new website can easily be shared to Facebook, Twitter etc for anyone who has accounts previouosly set-up.
There are also future plans to allow a Discussion Forum to be added to the website. This is just subject to further review. Other features that are already available but not yet turned on are website polls, user registration, adding a comment etc. Need help? Your website questions may have answers here in the Website Q & A.
We encourage everyone to consider making their Home Page our website address. This would highly bless our brethren who would want to know what’s going on in the church. As the website is now more functional in a lot of ways, I would like to ask any of our brethren to be involved in the Website Editorial Staff to allow more servants in the Lord to share their talents in the website maintenance and improvements. God Bless!
Ian Ramirez
WIN Ireland Website Administrator
Here is the Home Page of our previous website.
