Hollywood Adventist Church has a new website!

(click to enlarge, or better yet, just go to the actual website)

Today the Hollywood Adventist Church is unveiling it's brand new website. This is a day I've been waiting a long time for. About one year ago a small group of people gathered in my office to discuss how we would structure a new website for our congregation that focused on the things that make us unique and had distinct functionality that would strengthen our ministry. I'm sure it's not perfect, and I know I'm biased, but it's the best church website I've ever seen. I hope you take a few minutes and browse the site. Here are a few of my favorite features.

• The structure: God, Time, People, City, Arts.
• The web 2.0 features: Google Calendar automatically feeds directly into our site, Flickr images in the Hollywood SDA Pool do the same, our current Twitter status shows at the bottom of the right column automatically, and WordPress automatically generates a Tweet when we make a new post.
• The embedded videos: one of these is always featured on the right column. This is a way for our media ministry to continually feature what they're doing.
• Our Community Partners: Under the City tab, we have a list of the organizations we work with in the city and around the state and country. We also have a list of recommended local eateries and hangouts that our membership enjoys. This is both a way to bless our local businesses with a little advertising and share with our visitors in Hollywood some quality local haunts that probably won't be in their tour book!

I want to express my gratitude to two people who made this happen. The first is Scott Arany, a graduate student at Fuller Theological Seminary, one of our leadership team members and a new member of our church staff. Scott's design sense combined with his theological acumen, make this site sing. But it could not do what it does without technical skill of my friend Todd Hiestand (343design), who programmed and coded the entire site so that it actually works! I highly recommend both of these men if you are looking for help with your website. Todd also does design, and because the whole site it built in WordPress, it's amazingly simple to update and maintain.

Comments

[Zane]

Hey Ryan,

Great looking website! Love the look, and more importantly the great content. Kudos to you and the team.

-Zane

[David Oceguera]

I checked out the website. It looks really good. Very fitting for your ministry in Los Angeles.

[Sean]

Progressive site with an easy to understand layout....