The Basilica Community decided that their site needed a complete makeover… not just looks, but functionality as well.

Take a look…

Sorry for the long absence. I had a heart attack on December 30, and it has taken a while for me to get back to thinking about EasyChurchMedia.com. I had my health, and my family, and my church to think about first.

But, I haven’t completely ignored you. I have been learning about WordPress in the last month, and will soon be offering some exciting new features, including improved mobile and iPhone versions of your sites, a twitter-like site that will be great for youth groups, custom CMS, and so on.

As far as I know, no existing customers experienced any problems during my absence, but if you did, please accept my apologies.

However, I did turn down a couple of requests for new jobs.
But, we are back in business, and itchin’ to build you a new site.

Grace is a new church in Missouri City that hired us to do a full site for them…
Podcast, site, member community… everything… ExperienceHisGrace.com

Take a look…

Sue Streger, the head honcho at Kaleo Kids hired EasyChurchMedia.com to design some worship guides for kids to use during worship, as well as a cover sheet for the 3-ring binder that they will be stored in.

Here is the result:

The City of Deer Park, Texas - Podcast (link)

Grace - Full Site with podcast, pastor’s blog, rotating pictures, on-line member community (link)

Better Days - Podcast (link not available yet)

Kaleo - Worship Guide for Kids (link - non-readers)(link - readers)

An important part of your marketing is your business card. It’s something people take with them that shows a little bit of what you are about.

So, we take business card design very seriously.

These were designed for a new company called Abowd’s Renovations, who we are also designing a site for, and in the world of post-Ike Houston, where contractors are crawling out of every hole in the ground with hand written flyers, and Xerox copied business cards that are printed on regular paper, they wanted to really distinguish themselves, and show that they are professional.

These are glossy, full color business cards, with rounded edges, and they are beautiful.
We made the logo, did the layout, and then took care of getting 500 printed.

We do not have a set price for business card design and printing, but contact us, and we’ll talk it through.

There is something very easy that you can do that can dramatically improve your podcasts for iPhone and iPod Touch users (which is a ever growing segment of the population).

In addition to adding artwork to each podcast, in the lyrics section, you can add the main text of your sermon. In this picture, Hebrews 11:17-40 can be viewed on the screen so that the listener can read along while listening.

It takes 5 seconds on your end, but makes your podcasts more enjoyable and helpful.

I know that none of you are sitting there wondering what’s going on with EasyChurchMedia.com… where are they?

But here’s an update nonetheless…

Hurricane Ike all but destroyed the greater Houston area, including Deer Park, which is only a few miles from Galveston Bay, and home for EasyChurchMedia.com.

If you are waiting for something from us, we have had the same power outages as everyone else, and we have not been able to work on any sites or proposals for almost a week now.

But, things are slowly getting back to normal.

Power is slowly coming back on. The Internet is available in some places (no more driving around looking for an open network…). And the rumor is that the kids will be back in school on Monday.

But, here’s the good news… If you are one of our podcast clients, then your site never went down… our hosting company, Eleven2, never went down during or after the storm, which means that your podcasts maintained uninterrupted service.

So, when you are ready, just continue on as normal.

We hope to be back in the office by Monday or Tuesday of next week if possible, so if you are waiting on any design work, or proposals from us, then by the end of next week, we should have those ready.

But, as we have all learned this week, there is no guarantee.

The Southeast Organic Co-op needed a logo that reflected it’s character, while also telling you about what kind of organics they are dealing with. Since they are volunteer-run, and exist to bring organic fruits and veggies to Southeast Houston, I designed this logo:

I designed this to look like a stencil so that DIY banners, signs, screen-printing could easily take place without changing the look of the logo.

So when it came time to actually make large banners for the co-op, instead of uploading the logo to a printer and paying $200-300 for banners, I decided to but the logo to the test, and make a 3′ x 3′ stencil on matte board.

Here’s how I did it.

Step 1:

Print the logo on a transparency. This was more difficult than I anticipated since transparencies are harder to find than I thought they would be. But the print shop at Office Depot had a couple that they sold me for $0.10 each.

Step 2:

Blow it up on the matte board.

Step 3:

Trace it. This took about 1.5 hours.

Step 4:

Cut it out. This took 3 days.

I don’t have any pictures of the finished and painted signs, but we sprayed them a dark green on white, and then sprayed the tips of the artichoke a dark purple, and they look great.

Last night I experienced the best part of running this company…

I got to sit with a pastor who is in the beginning stages of planting a church for an hour and a half and talk shop.

Sure, we talked a lot about websites and logos and other quasi-important stuff, but we also talked about the gospel, and about the lost, and about our common desire to see people com to know the amazing grace that is only found in Christ.

This guy is located on the other side of town (which if you know Houston, then you know that’s 50+ miles away!) and I would have never had met him if it weren’t for this company.

Maybe God will use this business to help them attract people to their church to hear the gospel proclaimed, maybe not.
But He has already used this pastor to encourage me, and to re-focus me on His call on my life.

Thanks.