Yesterday. 11:30 am. After around 20 hours of work for me since Friday, and more if you count the volunteer who helped out and all the content my wife helped add over this past week, and plenty more hours from several people for the past eight months, the new, updated Lakeview Church website launched! The site is backed by WordPress and customized with a theme courtesy of the volunteer I mentioned, Chris Basham. The site is not 100% perfect (what website isn’t a work in progress?) but it is leaps and bounds ahead of our prior site, and I already spent a few hours tweaking things after it went live, a process that will continue.

Before you critique:

• Yes, the header image of our building (a holdover from the old site) will be replaced. Some areas already have new headers, we’re just waiting for the rest to be finished up.
• Most (if not all) of the pages, including the homepage, are valid XHTML. We checked.
• The sermon podcast feed is coming, we’re working on some technical details of the iTunes listing first, and I already took care of some of the technical issues of FeedBurner redirection (FeedSmith plugin required a few tweaks to forward a separate podcast feed).
• Print stylesheets are on the to-do list but aren’t implemented yet.
• Extended upcoming event information has yet to be entered.
• Some people listed on the site need to be hyperlinked to contact info. I’m researching the best way to do this without exposing them to spam scrapers, whether a contact form or perhaps a solution based on this email obfuscation article. There’s also this WordPress Plugin, which I like but have a few issues with. A combination of the two sounds best; whether I’ll leave this up to someone else or try and tackle it myself I’m not sure of.
• I’d like to add some Microformat markup in several places, using the hCard spec.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things, but I think we have a pretty good foundation. In addition to the above finishing touches, we can now refocus our attention towards doing something about the Lakeview Worship site, desperately in need of equal attention but still the home of our excellent new worship CD, not that I’m biased or anything :-)