After four months and over 115 hours, the First Baptist Church of Jackson, MN website is now live.

It was definitely challenging for me personally.  I got to do a lot of things that I love to do.  Specifically:

1. The design work — I love it.  I obsess over it.  I can’t stop thinking about logos and other design elements.  I have nearly 70 design & media related RSS feeds that I read in Google Reader.  I’m certainly not the most talented designer, but I know a few good ones who don’t mind me bouncing ideas off of them.
2. Helping out — There’s something about helping out that really drives me.
3. Learning some new things — Techniques and tools for doing websites change so fast, that I have to force myself to not redo every website I’ve ever done every couple of months.  It’s really hard to stay on top of it all, but trying new tools and techniques is always helpful — even if I don’t end up using them.

Some of the cool stuff about this new site:

1. Google Apps for your Domain — I helped them get Google Apps set up for their church.  Doing so provided an iCal feed that can be parsed and displayed on the site in PHP.  Google Apps is an absolutely amazing set of free tools for any kind of organization.  I use it at work, home and church.
2. Feedburner-based podcast — Feedburner allows tracking of iTunes subscriptions and offers many features to pump up visibility of a podcast.
3. Yahoo Grids page framework — It made the table-less page layout and font sizing a snap.  I’m also going to be using this on a project at work.  Saved a lot of headaches for sure.
4. SlideShowPro is one sweet flash slideshow and video component.  It’s worth the money, believe me.
5. Customized Suckerfish drop-down menu.  I needed a good cross-browser compatible CSS and JavaScript drop-down menu and Suckerfish fit the bill.  Turned out real nice, I think.