|
Original Website: In 2004 it was determined that St. Augustine’s should have a website as another medium to pass important information to the parish. James Ellis took on the challenge of designing and deploying a website for our parish and worked tirelessly to keep it updated and maintained ever since. St. Augustine’s would like to thank James for all his website work over the past years and wish him well in his future endeavors. New Website In May of 2007, Jason Cross approached Fr. Dominic and James Ellis with an idea to take the parish website to a new level. After much excitement derived from the meetings and lots of parish members; it was decided that Jason would take over the parish’s web site. After several hundred pictures and hours of research and programming we launched the website and have watched it grow faster than ever expected. In the first years of the new website we have added: -The Mass & Event Schedule were added and is also used to create the reports for the weekly bulletins and ministry schedules. -The ability for ministries and groups in the Parish to have their own webpages on the Parish Website. -Weekly Readings from the weekend Masses available in audio format for future reflection. -Testing of St. Augustines TV using a new technology to broadcast live events from the Parish. These changes and trials have now taken us into December 2008... So what about the future? The future of the St. Augustines website has already begun and we are taking giant steps towards having the most informative parish website around. I don't want to give away too much detail at this point but a few of the key projects we are working on are: A complete rewrite of the website software to work on a larger server to better serve our viewers. -We have now outgrown our current website hosting server and have located a new one that can better support our needs. The new server, however, is not compatable with the existing site and therefore a complete rewrite is in progress. When we launch the new site it will look and seem to function just like this one but will have a completely different backbone. It is also being rewritten using all the new technologies that I have learned to make it easy to change in the future. Rewriting and launching the Interactive Virtual Tour The interactive virtual tour is the jewel we have been working on since May of 2007 but could never quite get it the way we wanted. Since we have had the time to learn so much about that technology, we will take what we learned and endeavour to create the best virtual tour around. Control outside lighting systems from the website This is a new project that we have started work on since the final stages of the restoration. The current lighting control systems rely on a timer that does not follow daylight savings time and does not know sunrise and sunset times. These systems will soon be controlled by the website and will save the church hundreds of dollars in electrical usage. With the same technology and using the knowledge of the website we will also control feature lighting only allowing it to come on if there is an event or Mass scheduled for that evening. Getting more of our ministries and groups onto our parish website We are always trying to convince more groups to share their good news with the parish through the website. This increases communication and provides a greater sense of community. I am always told "not everyone has the internet" but my response is "not everyone can come to our church all the time". We receive emails every once in a while from people who have moved, are ill, or are away on vacation for extended periods of time that they really appreciate what we are doing because they are always kept up to date and still feel like a part of the St. Augustines community. We have made having a group website almost as easy as using a word processor and strive to keep it simple for anyone to use our technology. If you feel your group has something to put onto our website, please contact Jason Cross through the parish office or email at jcross@saintaugustines.ca So you can see the next several months are going to be very exciting for the website team and we look forward to developing this website well into the future. |