MQHR Website Committee Meeting 10-04-2015
Members present: John Mitchell, Joseph Groves, Tony Kernan,Jim Fritz, and Jill Heink
Tony opened the meeting with the group all joining in prayer.
The main focus of the meeting is to discus the design of the homepage. Multiple designs and ideas were laid out on the table for the committee to look at. Some of the designs were from some of the members, while other designs were from other parishes.
Group discussed having social media icons as part of the template and on every page. The committee agreed to have the icons as part of the template and on every page.
Group discussed having the parish's calendar on the website. It was suggested the committee should get the link to the parish calendar working first, before placing it on the website. Tony talked to eCatholic, and they offer a help document on how to embed your Google calendar into your eCatholic websiite.
Our next step with eCatholic is to start registering our website with eCatholic. After we do this, we only have 30 days to use the templates to see if we want to proceed with using eCatholic. Tony has agreed to be the person to start the process of registering our parish to start our 30 day trial. After the 30 day trial, we will register the website to our new domain (
www.MQHR.org).
Tony is going to start the process tomorrow and try some of the suggestions given at the meeting, to see what looks best. Once he gets into using eCatholics templates, he will be able to answer more questions like if we have the ability to place the social media icons somewhere else besides the top.
Then the group started discussing how many menu items they wanted to have on the website. Tony suggested we should have no more than 7 items across the top. John suggested we make the menu item for ministries to be "Service Opportunities". He feels this will help make the website more user friendly.
It was suggested by the committee to go with these menu items:
home, service opportunities, about us, faith formation, news, and electronic giving. Tony suggested to the committee to start thinking about what sub menu items they want to have under each menu.
The committee agreed to have Fr. Dan's name on the front of the website and a link to the dioceses.
The committee also agreed to have the mission statement as a footer on the website.
The committee agreed to have a search box that only searches MQHR's website.
Next meeting is scheduled attentive for the 18th, and if not then we'll meet on the 25th.
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MQHR Website Committee Meeting 10-18-2015
Members present: John Mitchell, Joseph Groves, Tony Kernan, and Jim Fritz
John lead the group in prayer before starting the meeting.
John showed the group where he added a link to Fr. Dan's article from the church's news letter "Notes From the Pastor". John mentioned the idea of one day making Father Dan's letters into a blog.
Tony showed the group the theme he chose on eCatholic's website. The name of the theme was called "Base". He has also tried another one called "Lisieux". Both of these themes allow us to add the Pastor's name, language selection, and search box at the top of the website.
Tony has found a different theme he likes a lot better, but it doesn't allow us to place any information with the banner at the top of the page. The name of the theme is "Padua". He also showed the committee a couple other themes that he liked, but they too don't allow us to place any additional information in the banner.
Tony mentioned when using the eCatholic editor, you must click the publish button to see the changes outside the editor.
The group decided that the Guadalupe yellow theme looks best. Tony mentioned that he will modify the banner, so it stretches all the way across the page.
Tony showed the group how he created and edited the Mass times on the new website.
Tony showed the group how to create parish news items for the home page. These will be used for the headlines that are currently on our website. The new site will also allow you to have the news items displayed on multiple pages, instead of just the home page.
Tony has put the Google analytics code into the website, so traffic to the website will start to be tracked. Tony has also created accounts for all the members to log into Google Analytics and view the reports. Tony showed the committee how to log in and use Google Analytics.
John thinks that the Vatican News on the home page, may not be the best place for it. Tony mentioned that we could reduce the number of news items we are showing for the Vatican, to help it not look as important as the news items for the parish.
Group discussed menu items that need to be added to our current menus. Tony suggested that because the site needs so many submenus, it may be best for the site to use a mega menu. The benefit of using a mega menu, is it allows fot more sub menu items. eCatholic's templates will not allow our site to have menus inside our sub menus.
Jim suggested creating an activities directory on the new website under the "Service Opportunities" menu.
Tony mentioned we still have 2 weeks before the trial period ends with eCatholic.
Tony is going to contact eCatholic tomorrow and let them know to start billing our parish directly after our trial period is up.
The Website Committee's next meeting will be on November 8th at 7:00pm.
last updated 10/20/2015 jm
