Joining Technological Forces

I'm not a techie.  I struggle big time!  My biggest struggle is passwords but I'll save that for another post.

We were paying a monthly fee for a service to create and host a web site.  Not many people were using the site so I shut it down.  This helped free up some budget money.  I then started doing a youth group "web page" on blogspot.com.  That worked but I was never really satisfied with it.

Just a couple of weeks ago I shut down the blog and created a new youth group web page.  The main purpose of the page is to give newbies and parents enough info to help them connect with the youth ministry and a place to promote events and our calendar.

I used Wix.com to create the site.  Wix has bunches of templates and all one has to do is some editing and uploading of pictures and voila you have a web site.  It literally took me about an hour to create the web site.  I'm not paying the upgrade fee for now.  I'm content with the free web site even if it has a little banner ad at the bottom for Wix.com.  You can check out our site here.




Here is what I ended up with

In a time when budgets are tight I think this works great for a free way to promote and disseminate information about your church's youth ministry.

I have been using Google docs for a couple of years now and am just getting the hang of this Google Drive thing.  (anyone using google wallet?  I wonder about using it)  I have some of my forms for camps and registration forms etc on Drive.  So today I took my camp docs and linked them on my camp page.  The forms, when submitted, go into an automatic spreadsheet.  Very handy for planning!

I also was able to embed our calendar I created on Google Calendar.  This way parents and students can drop in on the site and get the info they need for coming events and our weekly youth gathering.

So joining Wix web site with google docs we have a functional and nice web site that will accomplish it's purpose.

If you don't have a web site for your youth group but are looking into it I would suggest you check out Wix or some service like Wix.  A great and easy way to promote the group but also very easy on the budget.  FREE!

Google Docs allows you to have online registration forms, online medical releases that parents can download, all kinds of good free stuff that works great.


Do you have any tips on web sites and online document solutions?