Catholic Tech Talk

I’m happy to announce our panel of judges are in the final round of judging the 2013 Catholic Parish Website of the Year Contest!  I’d like to thank everyone who submitted an entry for the contest, we saw so many impressive websites this year and picking a winner won’t be an easy task. Our top [...]

Not only must we keep the Oklahoma tornado victims in our prayers, as good stewards it’s only right that we come together and do what we can financially as well. There are a few ways we can help direct parishioners where to donate—and of the options below, one of the easiest is donating online through [...]

I love Open Source technologies as so do many church website administrators.  Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal can be used to build some very nice church websites and for very low cost. Besides the robustness and easy of use of these CMSs, one of their other key benefits [...]

One of the things that bothers me nowadays is when I hear an announcement, or read one, that says “Visit our website for more information.”  That’s great, but where on the website?  In fact, have you ever asked the person who says it or wrote it where to go on the website?  In almost all [...]

On December 8th, we celebrated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It’s a beautiful feast  day with an incredible message and teaching not only about Mary, but about Christ, Himself. (All Marian doctrines point to Christ if you really think about it.) Anyway, this post isn’t about the actual feast day, but rather access to [...]

One of my favorite Catholic rituals is the candle lighting at the Easter Vigil.  A few years ago I witnessed this event in a somewhat large parish from a balcony.  The whole worship space was pitch black.  In comes the newly lit Pascal Candle down the main aisle.  Candles of those in the pews on [...]

When a parish is ready to start incorporating video footage into their homepage, it seems like their first instinct is to record the Sunday homily, post it to YouTube, and embed the video on their site. Personally I’m not a huge fan of this, I’d rather see videos that urge viewers to come to Mass—to [...]

The Lenten season is both a special and a busy time of year.  For your church’s website Ash Wednesday may have been the busiest day of the year, but Easter isn’t far behind.  One of the websites I’m responsible for is my company’s directory site, Seek And Find.  Seek And Find is a church listing [...]

Six Revisions has a great blog post, outlining some of the reasons why PUBLIC SCHOOL websites – umm – are not so hot. In addition, it has good suggestions on how to improve matters. So, everywhere it says PUBLIC SCHOOL websites, just insert PARISH SCHOOL websites. Obviously, Parish School’s have a different mission than the [...]