Five Things I Learned From Building a Website

Merge Ministry, the young adult minstry at my church, recently launched our new website, and I must say it’s pretty sharp. Dave (my college pastor) and I have been working for the past six months on the website. We worked long and hard on creating the right outline, getting the style to fit our ministry, and wording everything in just the right way. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it.

I’ve worked on a few websites before. After all, I’ve been running this one for a couple of years, and I administrate all the back-end stuff on the BackSpace Productions website. But this was my first experience of building a full-fledged website from the ground up. I started with a template, a few tools, and a long list of pages to create. It was an awesome experience, and it taught me a lot. Here are five things I learned from building a website.

1. Always have a plan.

Dave and I have been talking about creating a dedicated Merge website for a long time. I remember two and a half years ago when Dave approached me and asked me to put up a “Merge website coming soon” page on the old Cavanaugh Church site. In the grand scheme of things, two and a half years may not seem like a long time, but a lot happened during that period. We had several meetings where we sat down and talked about what we wanted the site to look like, what content we wanted on the site, and how we were going to manage the site once it was up. In the end, we had all these great ideas and all this amazing content, but we had no plan. We had no way of getting our awesome ideas out there until we sat down and came up with a solid strategy for how we were going to get it done. We got a domain name and a template through our media pastor, and then we decided that I was going to learn how to make the site while Dave wrote out the content. Once we made a plan, we started to see our ideas come to fruition, and a website started to form.

2. When in doubt, collaborate.

Creating the Merge website was definitely a group effort. Going in, I had very little knowledge about how to use all the powerful website-building tools that I had at my disposal. I had to depend on Dean, my media pastor, to show me the basics, and I consulted him several times throughout the process on how to do things that were outside of my skill set. I also worked very closely with Dave to make sure everything on the website looked and read the way it was supposed to. I’ve invested a lot in the Merge website, and I’m very proud of it, but if I had decided that the website was mine and that I was the only one who was going to have a say on how it looked and felt, the final product wouldn’t even be close to the great website we have now. I had to acknowledge that other people have knowledge and insight that I lack and that I can work with those people to make my work even better. Plus, it gave me an opportunity to learn new things, which is something I try to always take advantage of.

3. Accountability is key.

I was asked to start building the Merge website in June. I logged in and looked around at all the different tools I could use. I plugged in a few of the basic pages that had already been written. But I wasn’t in any rush to get the site finished. I figured I would work on it little by little and get it done eventually. That is, until Dave announced that the website would go live on January 1. All of a sudden, I had a deadline, and other people knew about it. Through this, I learned that a reasonable, self-imposed deadline can actually be your friend. It gave me a level of accountability that I needed to get serious about finishing the website in a timely manner. I set aside time each week to work on the website and update Dave on my progress. I got excited about the release date as it came closer and closer, and that gave me the inspiration to get the website finished and to make it the best it could be.

4. Find your voice.

The day before the website launched, Dave asked a fellow staff member to look over the site and offer feedback. When she finished looking over it, she got really excited and started telling Dave her thoughts on it. And then she gave the website one of the biggest compliments I think anyone could give to it. She said it really captured the tone of our ministry. Wow. We worked so hard on the look, on the content, and on the user experience, but the most important thing was that we used to website to reflect our ministry, and, at least according to her, we had accomplished that. That’s what it’s about. When you’re working on a website or any other creative project, you need to decide what tone or overall feeling you want to convey, and then you need to center everything else around that. While working on the website, we found the voice of Merge Ministry, and we communicated that on every page. That’s what we should always aim to do.

5. When you get stuck, just try something.

I can’t tell you how many times I hit a dead end when I was working on the Merge website. I would get an idea, and I would try to implement it using the knowledge and skills I had, and for one reason or another, it wouldn’t work. At that point, I would get discouraged and be tempted to give up on that idea altogether. But I eventually came to see these times as learning opportunities. Instead of giving up, I would re-think my approach to the problem, and I would try something new. Sometimes, that meant using a tool I had never tried before. It was a lot of fun. It wasn’t always succesful, but more often than not, I learned something new. There were some things that I had to seek help from others on (see point number one), and that’s OK, too. But I chose to take the approach that trying something and failing is better than doing nothing at all, and it led to some great results and a lot of new skills on my part.

Creating the Merge website was an amazing learning experiene. There’s no way I could put all that I learned from it into one blog post, but I hope this has given you at least a glimpse of everything I learned from building my first full-fledged website. I am so thankful for the opportunity and for everyone who played a part in it along the way (including my spellcheckers, Angie and Kristie). It took a lot of time and hard work, but it was worth it, and I couldn’t be more proud of the result. Thank you guys for reading. Please check out the Merge website if you haven’t yet, and I’ll see you on Saturday!

Way of Life

So it’s January 4th. You’ve (mostly) recovered from all the festivities Tuesday night, you’ve probably already written the wrong year on at least one important document, and if someone tells you, “Happy new year!” one more time, you’re most likely going to respond by punching them in the face. Am I right? Good. We’re all pretty much on the same page now.

We may not all be on the same page when it comes to our New Year’s resolutions, though. Sure, you had good intentions on New Year’s Eve when you declared that you were going to cut sweets out of your diet, but now that chocolate cake in the fridge is looking pretty tempting, and it’s taking everything you have not to grab a fork and consume the whole thing in one sitting. It’s OK if your resolutions are already getting tough. Or maybe you’ve already slipped up and broken a New Year’s resolution. That’s OK, too. The important thing is that you recognize where you are and start taking steps toward where you want to be.

Having said that, I would like to introduce the topic of my first Stuff Devon Likes post for 2013: Way of Life. Way of Life is a productivity app for iOS devices that helps you form good habits and break bad ones. The app is simultaneously simple and powerful, and combined with a great interface, this makes for fantastic user experience that can truly improve one’s life.

The basic function of Way of Life is simple. To start off, you add an item (such as “exercise” or “eat junk food”) to your journal. You then tell the app whether the item is something that is good for you or bad for you. Once you’ve made your list of items, you log each day whether you did each item or not. If an item is a good habit, you get a green mark for doing it and a red mark for not doing it. The opposite is true for bad habits. And that’s it. Do that every day for each habit, and you’ll start to fill out your journal. You can view your journal in week or month view, and you can view each item as a pie chart to see how your green and red marks match up against each other. You can also set a reminder at a certain time of day to remind you to fill out your journal in case you forget. But that is just the beginning of what Way of Life can do.

Some habits may be more complicated than just marking yes or no every day. For example, what if the habit you’re trying to form is to exercise five days a week? It hardly seems fair that you should have two big red marks on the days you don’t exercise. You are keeping to your goal, after all. But you also don’t want to lie and say you exercised when you didn’t. And that’s where Way of Life’s skip option comes in. You can give a day a blue mark by telling the app that you’re skipping that item for that particular day. This mark will not count for or against you. I use this feature on Sundays when my devotional book gives me a day of rest, as you can see in the image of my journal above.

Another handy feature in Way of Life is notes. Let’s return to the exercise example. Let’s say you don’t just want to exercise every day, but you want to keep a log of your daily workouts. When you go into Way of Life to give yourself a green mark for the day, you can also swipe left to add a note containing your workout details. The notes feature has unlimited potential in Way of Life (such as remembering why you skipped a certain day or why you gave yourself a red mark) and adds to the app’s overall usefulness.

Way of Life also comes with powerful statistical tools. On the Trend tab, you can see graphs for each of your items, and as you fill out your journal over time, you will start to see patterns in your data. Hopefully you’ll start to see your number of green bars for each item go up over time!

After all, that is the point of the app. It’s called Way of Life for a reason. It exists to help you improve your life by creating good habits and removing bad ones. Of course, the app can’t do that for you. The decisions you make are completely your own. But what the app does is make you more aware of the choices that you make and how those choices line up with your goals. Should you eat that piece of chocolate cake? If you do, you’ll have to mark it in your journal. And after all, your goal is to cut sweets out of your diet, and eating chocolate cake isn’t exactly in line with that goal.

I am of the firm belief that if we were more intentional about the decisions we make and the way we spend our time, our lives would be greatly improved. My experience with Way of Life has been fantastic. I use the app to keep myself accountable for my daily Bible readings, my self-imposed coding lessons, my New Year’s resolution to write daily, my sleep schedule, and more. I look forward to marking my journal each day, and it really has helped me think more about the decisions I make. If you made a New Year’s resolution, try using Way of Life as a tool to help you get on the right track. And even if you don’t have a New Year’s resolution, I’m sure there’s something you’d like to start do (or stop doing). Give Way of Life a try and see if you can start forming some good habits today.

Way of Life is available for free on the App Store. The free version lets you add three items to your journal, which is plenty to get started with. If you like the free version, you can unlock unlimited items for just $4.99.

Happy New Year

Hey, friends! I just wanted to wish you all a happy new year. I hope you had a fun, safe night last night, and I hope 2014 has treated you well so far. New years are so exciting! I know it may seem arbitrary, but the idea of a clean slate, a new start, it just makes me smile.

If you haven’t yet, check out my New Year’s Resolutions blog post from yesterday. Also, the new Merge website that I’ve been working on for the past six months launched today! Give it a look and let me know what you think.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll check back often as this exciting year unfolds. Happy 2014, friends, and I’ll see you on the Internet!

New Year's Resolutions

Hello, friends, and happy new year! I hope you’ve all had a wonderful 2013, and I hope that you’re excited for what’s to come in 2014. I know I am.

This is the time of year where everyone is making their New Year’s resolutions. Most everybody has some sense of what they hope to change in the coming year. For some people it may be to exercise more or to eat more healthy foods. For others, it may be about enriching relationships and spending less time at work. No matter what it is, I think we can all think of at least one thing that we’d like to look back on a year from now and see some sort of change in.

But we rarely follow through on our New Year’s resolution. The problem I see with them is that they always seem to be really vague. A lot of people say they want to lose weight as their New Year’s resolution. That’s all well and good, but if you don’t have a plan of how you’re going to accomplish your goal of losing weight, then you’re probably not going to make much progress. And besides, if your goal is simply to lose weight, you could lose half a pound and consider your goal achieved. No, a good New Year’s resolution is specific about what you hope to achieve, and it comes along with a plan of how you hope to accomplish your goal in the 365 days you’ve given yourself to accomplish it.

I’ve never had much success with New Year’s resolutions, mostly because of the problems I just talked about. So this year, I’m going to be specific about what I hope to achieve in 2014, I’m going to detail my plans now instead of trying to figure them out later, and I’m sharing my goals with you guys so that hopefully you can offer me some accountability. Maybe this will be the year my New Years resolutions are successful.

So here we go. These are my 2014 New Year’s resolutions.

1. Write every day.

I don’t know about you, but I love to write. I discovered this pretty recently. I started out just journaling in Day One before bed to clear out my thoughts so I could sleep at night. I still do that, but now I’ve started doing more creative writing, and it’s something I really enjoy. It turns out that writing can actually be fun when you’re writing something for yourself and not for a grade.

So I bought this awesome creative writing app called Byword, and my goal is to use it every day to write something. Doesn’t matter what it is. It could be a blog post or a script or a song or a haiku. I just want to set aside some time each day to get away from the to-do lists and the papers and the assigned readings and just write whatever my heart desires.

2. Start a Bible journal and choose a verse of the day.

I read the Bible everyday, and for the past few months, I’ve been sharing a verse from my readings everyday that I think will encourage others. But I don’t think that reading a few chapters and sharing a verse everyday is enough. I’m going to start writing out responses to my Bible readings in a journal that I can save and expand on as I read through the Bible over the years. I’m also going to pick a specific verse out of my readings each day to focus on throughout the day and share on social media along with some thoughts on that verse. I think this well help me think more deeply about what I’m reading and also choose a specific verse to memorize, apply, and share each day.

3. Film a 1SE video.

I tried to make a 1 Second Everyday video last year, and I kept it going until sometime in July. But I ran into some serious technical difficulties over the summer and decided to stop becuase I had no way of sharing the videos and therefore no reason to keep making them. But good news! They finally released a fix for the app just before Christmas, so I’m going to give 1SE another shot. I want to make every day count, and I want to share those moments with you. So be looking out for a new 1 Second Everyday video at the end of each month, and if you’d like to be in one, just let me know.

4. Keep a consistent blog schedule.

For those of you who don’t know, I relaunched my website in November, and I’ve started a weekly blog. I tend to write about my own experience of living the Christian life and what I have learned from it. I’ve really enjoyed sharing my experiences that way, and I hope that you guys enjoy reading it.

Anyway, I’d like to continue doing those weekly blogs on Tuesdays, so that will stay the same. On top of that, I’m also going to start a series on my blog called Stuff Devon Likes. I’ve done this before, but I want to make it a regular thing. It’s where I do a write-up on someting that I enjoy and want to recommend to you. It might be a movie or a song or an app. It’ll change each week, and if you have something in particular you’d like for me to review, I’d be happy to look into it. Stuff Devon Likes will be posted on Saturdays.

Besides my weekly blogs and the Stuff Devon Likes series, I’ll also do some sporadic blog posts on what’s going on in my life. Between these three, I hope to have consistent, quality blog posts that share my thoughts, my experiences, and things I find noteworthy throughout the year.

Conclusion

So there ya go. I’m going to write something everyday, no matter what that something is. I’m going to keep a Bible journal and share a verse of the day along with my thoughts on that verse. I’m going to post monthly 1 Second Everyday videos. I’m going to blog on Tuesdays and post Stuff Devon Likes articles on Saturdays. At the end of the year, I hope to have a Bible journal covering the entire Bible, 12 1SE videos, 52 blog posts, 52 Stuff Devon Likes articles, and some sporadic blog posts updating you on my life. Wow. That’s a lot. But I think I can do it, and I think it’ll be worthwhile if I do it right.

So why am I doing all this, you ask? Why bother making these videos and writing all these blog posts if I’m not even sure anyone will watch or read? Well, it’s because I want to share my life with you. Whether or not you participate is completely your choice, but I want to invite you, my friends and family, to join me in this exciting year of my life.

This year is going to be crazy. In May, I’m going to graduate from Hendrix College. I’m going to be traveling most of the summer on all these crazy trips that my church sends me on. And in August, I’m going to be moving to Waco, Texas, to start working on my Masters of Divinity at Truett Seminary. And that’s just a few of the things I have planned for 2014. This time next year, I hope to be finished with my first semester of seminary and preparing for my second. I hope to be a little older, a little wiser, and a lot more experienced at this whole Internet thing.

So thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll join me on this exciting journey. No matter what, have a happy 2014, God bless, and I’ll see you on the Internet.

Merry Christmas

Hey, friends! I just wanted to wish you all a very merry Christmas. I hope wherever you are, you’re surrounded by those you love and remembering the things that matter most. I’m so thankful that I got to spend this Christmas with my family and watch my adorable nephew Aiden get excited over his gifts. May God bless you and your loved ones as we celebrate Christ’s birth. I’ll see you guys on Tuesday to talk about my New Year’s resolutions!