The last two days I have been working hard on transitioning my church, The Well, from a Facebook group to a Facebook Page. There are some subtle differences and some major differences that made me make this decision. Facebook pages do pretty much everything a group does, but a whole lot more… Status Updates/Twitter for the Org: in groups, you weren’t able to create a status update so the only time people ever heard from the group after signing up was when you sent e-mails. It’s now great to be able to send a status update to the people from my church without having to send out an e-mail. This is great for prayer requests, links, articles to read, etc. I connected the status updates...Read More →
Category: Web Design
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November 10, 2009
Custom Facebook Designs for Churches
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November 5, 2009
Todd Hiestand v7.0
If you are a visitor to my website and not just reading this through my RSS feed, you’ll notice my blog has some new clothes. Okay, so I know what you are thinking. Another blog design? Really? Really? Version 7?!?! I promise, there really is some rhyme and reason to this redesign. First of all, I don’t blog as much as I used to so I needed to find a way to bring my older posts “up” into the spotlight a bit. I think I accomplished that here. Second of all, I’m not just bored. In fact, I’m busier than ever. But, the last design I had was a theme that I had been developing to resell to clients. I’d been testing it on my...Read More →
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October 15, 2009
Advice on Working with Web Designers
Most of my readers will know that I support my work as a pastor with two other jobs. I work at Starbucks part-time for the benefits for my family and then I spend about 20 hours a week building websites. I really love my work as a web designer, its a nice avenue for me to be creative. Over the years, I’ve worked with about 50 clients and most of them have been great. But every once and a while I get the stereotypical client who just doesn’t have a clue about how to treat and respect a webdesigner. It’s usually not because they are bad people, but more because they are just ignorant of what goes into building a site. In fact, its often...Read More →
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June 24, 2009
It’s Official: I’m Going Back to Starbucks
It’s hard to believe but I have been a pastor at The Well for about nine years now. In those years, I’ve served at The Well on a part-time-paid basis. This has been an intentional model for us as it allows our church to have a more diverse staff and leadership. This has served us very well as our other part-timer, the one and only Gary Alloway, complements my gifts really well. I can truly say that being “bi-occupational” has been a great asset to the mission of our church community. (By the way, I use the term “bi-occupational” instead of “bi-vocational” because I believe that my vocation as a Christian is “witness.” What I do for pay does not change my vocation. My vocation...Read More →
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April 16, 2009
343design Redesign
I redesigned my freelance web design portfolio this week. I’m really happy with how it turned out. Take a look: http://www.343design.com. If you know people who are looking for some web work I’d be honored if you sent them my name and site.
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March 16, 2009
A New Blog Design
This weekend on the airplane I got inspired to give my blog a bit of a makeover. I stuck with the same colors and even the same background but really tried to simplify things a bit. I am also writing some longer articles more often so I made a place to highlight those. I still have some work to do on the sub pages and the sidebars but I figured I would toss it up now and that would inspire me to actually get it done faster and that way you could see the work in progress. Let me know what you think and what you find that might be broken still.
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December 11, 2008
Design Refresh and New Site Icon
The past month or so I have been working a new design job as a semi-long term contractor for design company. I’ve been working hourly so its easy for me to slip into the temptation to work all the time whenever I have a free hour from church or family. This of course, leaves little time for fun and hobbies. So, I’ve intentionally tried to keep myself from working on paid design work until after 10:00 at night to leave room for hanging out with my wife, reading or working on a hobby. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while could probably guess that my blog serves as a hobby for me, and this includes the design aspect of it....Read More →
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December 3, 2008
Mailing List Subscription Stupidity
This is what you call re-dic-u-lous. These days, there is absolutely no reason that I should have to wait 10 days for your records to be updated. Get with it people. It’s 2008. Not 1996. Don’t even get me started on how I got on the list in the first place. I’ve never used their product. Marketing is a bit more effective when I am actually interested in your product.
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October 21, 2008
My Workspace
One of the nice things about my line of work (pastor / freelance webdesigner) is that I get to work from anywhere. Most of my friends know that if they want to find me, there is a good chance I am at the nearby Starbucks. I’m a fairly social person so I like to be in locations where there are other people. But sometimes, I need to find some peace and quiet and lose all the distractions. The picture above is my “new” work space in my basement. I used to have all kinds of stuff on my desk and on that shelf you see. I had a ton of books, file shelves and other office type stuff. But, yesterday I organized my desk again...Read More →
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October 7, 2008
A Few New Website Launches
I’ve been slaving away on a few websites. A couple of them are done and a few of them are a few days away from launch. But, I wanted to draw your attention to a few sites that I not only designed but also wholeheartedly recommend. C4ML – Catlyst for Missional Leadership at Biblical Seminary This isn’t a new website but its one that I developed about 6 months or so ago and we refreshed and reworked the site layout a bit. With a site so heavy on content, it’s often helpful to revisit the site a few months after launch to see what worked and what didn’t. So, I spent a few hours yesterday reworking some stuff. I like the results. The site...Read More →
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September 17, 2008
New Front Page Layout
If you visit my site much you’ll notice that I have a new layout here on the front page. I am still getting to the sub-pages but I wanted to see how this worked out in reality before I did much else. And, honestly, I am not sure when I’ll get to the rest of the site since my schedule is getting more and more busy. The reason for the chages come from my frustrations with blogs in general. The biggest frustration is that old posts get lost and information organization is fairly hard to manage. For example, some people come to my blog because they are my friends and they will read anything. But, the fact is, they are mostly looking for information /...Read More →
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August 20, 2008
Comments are Back
For some reason my comments weren’t working the last two days. Someone finally brought it to my attention so now I realize that you all don’t hate me. Phew.
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May 17, 2008
Free Lean and Clean WordPress Theme
I’ve decided to make the WordPress Theme I developed available for free. I’ve really benefited from so many free themes out there early on that I figured it would be kind to give something back to the WordPress Community. Read more about it here.
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May 12, 2008
Testing Out My New WordPress Theme
If you are looking at an orange and black theme, that means you are now looking at the WordPress theme I am developing for release to the public. I have it on here because I want to give it some good testing before I release it to others. If you see any issues, please let me know. The theme will work with widgets and will include an image file so you could add a custom header if you wanted. I’m pretty excited to release it as it will be the first one for me. So, here’s the question, I have put a TON of work into this thing and am strongly considering selling it for a mere $5, would you pay that for this theme?...Read More →
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May 10, 2008
Does Disorganization Kill You?
No, not literally. I guess it could do that, if, like, you are so disorganized that you forget where you live and starve to death or something. But, I’ve come to realize recently that I am way too disorganized in my work habits, I waste too much time and I am not focused enough on my work (both design and church stuff). This was one of the big things that came out of my weekend away a few weeks back. Seems I am not the only one, Bob Hyatt, a pastor in Portland writes, “I’m coming to realize that, at least for me… and maybe for you… my disorganization is killing me. It’s very literally sapping all the ‘bundance out of my abundant life and...Read More →
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May 9, 2008
Is my feed broken?
For all of you who read my blog from my RSS feed, can you do me a favor and click over and leave me a comment and let me know that you are getting my feed updates? I hear a nasty rumor that my feed is broken. If you don’t know what an RSS feed, don’t worry about it. I’ll explain it some other time. Now I’ve got to go get my youngest child from the grips of his big brother!
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May 1, 2008
Why and How I Use Twitter
I’ve been using Twitter for quite a while now. I, like most people, signed up and then didn’t use it for a few months but a while back I started using it more and more. For those of you who don’t know what Twitter is, its essentially a micro blog. Essentially write short 140 character updates which people can then view. The best part about Twitter is its social networking feature. You can have friends that you follow their updates and they follow yours. For someone like me who spends a lot of time along in my office on the computer, this is a helpful because it keeps me in some kind of community with others. Here are some of my thoughts about Twitter: Twitterrific...Read More →
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April 30, 2008
Speaking of Shiny New Things
On a whim tonight, I made some major modifications to my blog design. I did a bunch of things…. The Site width is now 960px instead of 1000px. I hope this gives the design a little more breathing room. I reduced the font size a bit. Simplified the header Tried to make the section titles a bit more bold (as i want to highlight the little sayings in throw in there). I put the feeds up at the top. I only have two full posts showing now, the rest below it are excerpts (for you geeks out there, this was done by using two looks and i queried posts, then offset the bottom section by two posts) I moved the flickr photos down to the...Read More →
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April 25, 2008
I Sold this Blog to Google for $1,000,000
Okay, another overstatement of a title. But, I am now sporting some ads on my blog. What’s this world coming to? Next thing you know my kids will be paid to wear companies names on their clothing…oh, wait, I think we pay them for the privilege to do that… Anyways, I personally think these ads are fairly un-intrusive. I am actually going to take all the money I receive off these ads and put them toward our adoption debt. So, it’s for a good cause! Let me know if you are completely offended by these ads or see anything inappropriate pop up.
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March 4, 2008
Subtle Site Changes
If you are paying attention, you’ll notice that I’ve made some changes to the copy on my site. I’ve edited the subtitles to the major sections and edited and added some quotes to the top bar. I’m not sure if you even read these parts of my site but I sure do have fun writing them… i am also re-creating my blog roll on the right sidebar. If you don’t see your blog there I either don’t like you anymore or I just haven’t added it yet. Hopefully its the latter rather than the former!
