Christ Church Moreton Hall

Christ Church has had a website since October 1996, the oldest version that I could find at the Internet Archive being from early 1997 (The old newsline brings back memories!). Until now it has been a static site, with content taken from the church brochure that we distribute to new houses on our estate. The fortnightly newsletter and monthly prayer diary were uploaded regularly, but it was a bit of a tedious chore.

In January 2005, our minister decided it would be nice if we could put the sermon text online each week. So it was left to me to determine the best (and cheapest) method to do this. I choose to use blogger and we got a step closer to a dynamic website. Meanwhile we had started recording the Church sermons onto computer using the free software Audacity. Around the same time, the Minister had been doing a bit of surfing and found some Church websites which hosted recordings of their sermons. "Why can't we do that?" he asked. "Because it would cost us" I replied.

A bit of hunting around and I came across Ourmedia, which allows you to upload digital media for free. So in September 2005, we started uploading our sermon podcasts.

The process was unfortunately not easy, since it required manually adding a link to the audio from our blogger site, and it all got a bit messy and complicated. Thinking that there must be a better way of doing this, I entered the world of Content Management Systems (CMS).

After reading several reviews, I finally settled on Drupal, and as our ISP (Wanadoo) didn't support PHP, I found a free Christian webhost, Witness Today.

So now a new website is born. I am able to setup multiple accounts so different people can create content. The site is able to hook up to the ourmedia RSS feed, so links to the sermons are created automatically. We can put all our services and events straight into a calendar to allow people to easily see what we are doing in the future. We are also trialling an online Meeting Room Booking System to help keep track of which parts of the Church are in use when!

If you have any comments about our new site, please let us know using the Contact button at the top of the page!