Parkside Baptist Church in Mesquite, TX uses WordPress. They used the Resolution Theme featured on this site a couple days ago. Resolution can be purchased for $35 from ThemeForest.net. A home page builder comes with the Resolution theme and Parkside made good use of the jQuery slider and the six content boxes for their home page.
Resolution is a WordPress theme from THB Themes that works well for churches. It’s clean, simple, has unlimited sidebars and colors, uses Google fonts, custom widgets, custom post types and 2 jQuery slideshows. It’s available for $35 at ThemeForest.net. On Thursday we’ll feature a church that used this theme for their site for an excellent look and feel.
One of the best bloggers and leaders around, Michael Hyatt, utilizes a page peel feature on his blog. At the top right you can see the Click Here image which reveals more info as you mouseover it. It’s essentially an add, but like the Footer Slider, it can be used on your church website to promote something specific. Maybe it’s a big event you do once a year or another way of subscribing to an email newsletter.
I’ve installed and used the same one Michael is using – Page Peel. It’s Flash based. You can get jQuery Page Peel if you prefer avoiding Flash. Here’s a tip, when designing the big image make sure you account for how much of it isn’t seen even when it peels back.
What else do you use to promote things in a way that stands out?
One of the most common features sought in a premium WordPress theme is the ability to have some kind of scrolling featured content slideshow on the home page. But an argument could easily be made that this kind of feature shouldn’t be theme-based but plugin-based so that it transfers from one theme to another. If you’re looking to add such a featured content slider to your existing site without changing themes, here are seven plugins worth checking into.
SlideDeck features a nice original user interface. Rather than scrolling through thumbnails, it works more like an online presentation with accordion-like slide windows. It’s a premium plugin and seems a bit pricey considering the ease with which one can implement opensource javascript solutions for free, but it is very nicely done, and there is a free version, though you’ll be displaying an ad for the SlideDeck brand if you go the free route.
The Featured Content Gallery plugin has been around for a while and is usually easily recognized because the base code is also used in plenty of premium themes on the market, most notably many of the earlier StudioPress themes. It offers the ability to display some content snippets as an overlay.
DDSliderWP offers eleven transitions and a very slick backend control panel. It offers a ton of customization options, but it is premium, so you’ll need to invest about $20 to have its slickness on your blog.
Sugar Slider is quite nice in that it offers a multitude of display options including one very similar to SlideDeck (mentioned above). It also features a robust control panel to manage its features as well.
There is very little in the way of a description on this plugin’s details page, but it has a nice aesthetic to it with a couple of different display options.
And two others worth mentioning in this list that don’t offer much in the way of detailed descriptions would be WordPress Slideshow Gallery Plugin and Front Slider Plugin.
If you know of others, feel free to give us a link in the comments!
The WordPress Church Theme was designed by Chris Molitor and offers a pretty simple, straight-forward usage of WordPress for a church website. There are 5 color options, a theme options panel, and some sweet jquery effects such as hover navigation effects and an accordion-like sidebar. It offers some pretty basic social web integration as well. A very nice starter theme for a church on a budget!
