Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

Towards the end of last month, I read a status update from my Uncle Matthew who is Pastor of King's Church in Medway. His status championed the launch of his church’s new website and encouraged his Facebook connections to visit. Except that when I did, I wasn’t enthused by what I saw. After I put across my point of view he agreed with my assessment and accepted my invitation to review the current site and work with him and his team to start again - pretty much from the ground up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited the church several times. On each occasion we’ve had a proactive discussion on what a potential new website should feature, how it should look and most importantly of all, how it should communicate - not just to visitors of the website, but to friends of people who belong to the church, or organisations that help on a daily basis to do good for the greater church community. We made a decision early on that we were actually dealing with multiple websites rather t...

For a long time I’ve had this belief that Sky are evil and as a corporation have done more harm than good for English football, that they’ve taken the working class soul out of the game and made it a rich persons plaything. The only problem is, last night - I became its latest victim. I sold out. Sacrificed my team for the comfort of my lounge and added my last few pennies into the bottomless Rupert Murdoch honeypot instead of being there for the team I love. Gillingham vs Southend on a Monday night. Nothing glamorous about that, but being a Gillingham supporter has never been about glamour. The closest I’ll ever get to see Gillingham in Europe was a friendly in Calais a couple of years ago and the Premier League seems just as far away. We were close once, not so long ago in fact, finishing 11th in what is now the Championship, but it is the ghost of those glory days that make the current level of mediocrity so difficult to bare. When it was announced that Gillingham vs Southend ...

A lot can happen in the short space of a week. Since I wrote last time and showcased some of the websites that I liked and others that I didn’t, I have met with King’s Church Medway on two separate occasions and formulated the beginnings of a working plan. A plan, that by the time it is complete should see them sitting pretty with not one new website but potentially four! Our first meeting last week was an introductory affair. I met my Uncle Matthew and Austin, a Deacon within the church who overseas the media department and built the current site. Alongside the two of them was a chap named Christian (ironically enough) who wants to help out and volunteered his services just as I had. We spoke about some of the points that I had raised in my original blog post about the current site, we talked about their current working processes and chatted freely about what the new site should do and more importantly some of the things that it needed to contain. Christian also led us through ...

Last week I took a look at a website ( www.kings-medway.co.uk ) which belongs to a church run by my Uncle Matthew and are doing some wonderful work for their local community. I pointed out that perhaps the website could function better and look more professional. More importantly, it should show off some of that great work that is happening on a daily basis and be more accessible for the local people of Medway and beyond. Whilst discussions are very much at preliminary stages as to the concept of the new website, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to look around at other church websites, get some inspiration and look at what people have done well, what type of content is being displayed and what pitfalls to avoid. As design is always so subjective, it should be stated that those that I’ve not particularly liked might well be by others. It should also be worth remembering that someone, or a group of people have put the time and effort to make these websites work, an...