This weekend, a new client website went live – Brandywine Valley Baptist Church.
This was a fun project that had several key features including:
- Staff Overview
- Staff Individual Profile Pages
- Sermon Archive
- Integrated Sermon Media Player
- Event Calendar (with Registration and Ticketing)
- Clean, easy to create Online Forms
This WordPress powered site gives them much more flexibility and ability to make updates quickly and reliably – something their old site did not. Based on the iThemes Builder framework, the site was customized to the needs of the church including easy to read typography, clean look, and multiple layouts.
To enable the key feature of having integrated sermons on the site, I enjoyed getting to implement the Series Engine. This is a premium plugin and the creator has done a great job making it work well with WordPress. It is also user-friendly so that the client can easily use it to keep the site updated with the weekly sermons. As a developer, I enjoyed the ability to style the player and keep a consistant look with the rest of the site.
It is flexible with many ways to customize how the player functions and includes podcasting, social sharing, and easy integration with video hosted on other sites like Vimeo or YouTube. If you have a need to put a collection of audio and/or video messages online – I highly recommend it!
Another key component was the ability to have an event calendar with registration, payment and ticketing ability. For this functionality Event Espresso was used. I had recently heard good things about this premium plugin from the WordPress community and I agree – they do a fantastic job giving robust functionality that is still very manageable be the client. There are different add-ons available depending on your needs so you can go light or fully functional.
The site was also set-up with WP multisite capability that they can use in the future to expand various ministry sub-sites. This was my first time really digging in with WPMU and now I can really see the benefits of using the network setup. If need the control of single WordPress administration, but want the flexibility and control that comes with separate sites, multisite is a very good option.