Register Your Club Online

Each year in the summer and fall, literally thousands of ministries across the country will go through the process of registering their Early Learner, Olympian, or Student Ministry for the coming school year. It's not a difficult process and it's certainly worth it, but would it not be easier to skip all the paper? Shouldn't we be able to use our credit cards right online and take care of everything instantly? As a former youth pastor myself, I can relate with these kind of thoughts. Well, hold on tight, because things are about to get really cool!

Following are some screen shots of our brand new ONLINE registration system for your ministries. That's right, no more forms, no more checks, no more stamps, and no more trips to the post office! (Unless you just want to. We know there are those of you out there who just LOVE to write checks!) We want to make it as streamlined as possible for you to do the necessary administrative stuff without a major hiccup. Check out these screen shots and try not to kiss your computer screen :) [Click the Pics for a Bigger View] Feel Free to COMMENT below any blog entry.

Curriculum Management

One of the extremely useful features of our new Local Church Ministries website will be our ability to allow registered ministry members to download their curriculum. No longer will you have to remember where that little cd went, or have a breakdown when someone scratches that cd, or spend hours running off lessons in the copy room. Now you'll be able to view and download it all right online. What's more, the site will know who you are and what ministries you are registered for and will automatically grant you access to those files upon your login.

When we went into this project, this was kind of the limit of our scope. We thought the benefits to just this portion of curriculum download were a huge step forward. However, our web development company took us a whole step further! They suggested that we could give users the possibility to log back in after teaching a lesson and leave comments for others to use as they prepared the same lesson. They suggested we could allow users to rate the lessons, upload media content they had used in their presentations, and generally create an entire community of helpful networking around the lessons. We were BLOWN away! This is EXACTLY what we need!

I'm excited to share some of the screenshots and progress from this very project. Check it out!

What a couple of weeks!

Wow, these past couple of weeks have really flown by. One of the biggest accomplishments is that we are on the very edge of going live with our brand new store where customers can purchase all sorts of Word of Life curriculum, clothing, and ministry resources. Many people have put a lot of hours into this project over the past few days and we are VERY excited to see it come to completion. We'll be sure to announce it here the moment it is live. One of the greatest things is that this is only the first step! In the coming months, we will open up a whole new dimension to our store as we make it possible for supporters to support missionaries and projects around the world online.

Check out this latest screen shot of the web store.

Finishing up the Store!

This past weekend we worked long hours (past midnight every night) on the technical aspects of the new web store. We (John Armstrong and Nathan Shoultz) spent the weekend in the home of a volunteer, getting the new web store and our current sales and inventory systems to talk to each other. The volunteer is a very technologically gifted man who oversees all of the database administrators for one of the largest credit card / banks in the USA. We were able to put into place tools that will:

• Automatically bring orders from the web store into our systems at HQ’s
• Automatically send all the UPS & FedEx tracking information for those orders back to the web store after they are shipped so customers can track right from the web store
• Automatically update inventory between our HQ’s systems and the web store
• Refining on the look and feel and figuring out how to make adjustments on how it looks

We were also able to start working on the methodology needed to allow leaders of our club churches to have access to club only related products in the web store and tie all that into the new web site management tools we are working on. There is more work needed to complete this, but we have a tentative plan on where we want to go and what we think is needed to get there.

Missionaries

Last week our missionaries from across the country were gathered together in either the Northern Summit or the Southern Summit. At these staff summits, we presented our vision and some of the screen shots from the brand new website we're developing. Our missionaries were encouraged and energized as they began to see some of the potential for what they will be able to do with their own new websites. Posting articles, sharing articles, posting media, offering resources, online event registration and online giving will all be incorporated in the new websites. Check out some of these screen shots from a sample site we created.

So You Want Online Curriculum?

One of the things many people have been asking us for in the last few years has been a way to download their curriculum. Let's face it, who doesn't want that? I've been a youth pastor. I know what it's like to hit Wednesday night, scarf down dinner, head to the church, make it 3 minutes early, open my bible and find.... nothing! Where did that lesson go? I was sure I folded it up and put in here right after I wiped off the coffee and toast crumbs this morning! Don't leave me hanging here. I know there's more of you out there!

Seriously, that's only one of the many great reasons we want to do online downloads of our bible studies. We spent the better part of yesterday afternoon in a conference call with one of our developers utterly amazed at his presentation of what will be possible in a few short months! He showed us how each missionary, church, ministry staff, and volunteer leader will be able to login and download his lessons. But it doesn't stop there! He told us how a person will be able to log back in after he taught the lesson, rate it with a 5 star system, leave comments for others to see, upload resources like videos, illustrations, dramas, etc that he used (so others who taught the lesson later could use it) and more! I am PUMPED about this piece of our new website. Please be praying for our team as we forge ahead with this endeavor. Praise the Lord for these opportunities.

Web Store Under Way

One of the major areas of improvement we hope to make in our online presence is in our online store. If you used the old store, you know that it got the job done, but was a pretty difficult beast to navigate! We hope to make the new store slick, easy and incredibly adept at getting you what you want FAST. We've put hours into planning and implementing this whole thing. Here's a list of a few things the store will include:

• a sharp visual interface that is connected with our future overall look and feel for Word of Life
• a powerful reductive navigation feature that allows you to get exactly what you want FAST
• a well thought out and appealing layout of the products
• a quick and easy way to checkout
• and much more!

If you'd like to see a quick snapshot of what this site will look like, check this out...