Your custom website with LutherNet can be changed in millions of ways. Literally, you can choose any color, even if the site comes with a basic color scheme. If you want the colors to match your team or your stained glass, it's as simple as using the pointer to make the changes. Granted, you'll need to have some contrasting colors for titles and links, but you have the chance to incorporate virtually any color scheme.

We use royalty-free images from real photographers willing to share their photos. We can also take photos for you, or we can add photos you already have. We always recommend compressing photos as much as possible, and you don't want site loads to take a full minute or more because of a few full-size images. The best option is often a photo gallery that uses thumbnails, but it's also nice to have images in many of the articles. We will show you how to add photos without a lot of effort.

 Video should be hosted on Youtube or another remote site. You can embed the video easily in articles using a simple component we can provide with your site. People will not generally find your Youtube channel before your website, so the point is to have the content on your actual site. Same thing goes for social media. Go ahead and start a Facebook page or a Twitter account, but don't expect potential members to be impressed by scrolling through to find useful information. Those accounts should be set up to interact and drive them to your website, which is like the rock on which your online presence is built.

There are plenty of wrong ways to deal with videos, and there are plenty of ways to make it nearly impossible to handle for a church staff. Here's a scenario that might be of interest: our church was recording DVDs using an old-fashioned linear editing device, meaning the crew had to hit a record button on a giant console. The camera was DVD-quality. Therefore, we made DVDs in DVD-quality.

We wanted to upgrade, so we got a really high-end camera. At 30 frames per second, it would be about 2 GB for 10 minutes. We had it set to 24 fps, like in a movie, which looks cool as a movie, but this was for people to watch baptisms and weddings. The problem is that we couldn't just dump the whole service on Youtube because of worries about song copyright, so we had to edit the file. If you've ever tried to edit a full HD video on an underpowered laptop, you know it's a chore. Basically, a lot of crashing and gnashing. We tried converting to lower res video to edit. But that takes a long time per video, too.

While Youtube's new service of taking copyrighted music out of videos (Beta) might be the eventual solution, the camera even makes that difficult because it separates out each 10-15 minute chunk at around 2 GB, meaning you'd still have to edit and render a single video to put on Youtube.

The best solution depends on your needs. Our church wants to use the camera at it's full awesomeness, which means 500GB of storage a year just to store services. Since external hard drives die every five years or less, it starts to get pricey. If you like cinematic, then 24 fps might be good. TV is generally 30fps, though. Unless your pastor does a lot of fast movements, you probably don't need 60 fps.

We might be sticking with 1080 lines of resolution, but the old way of burning a DVD was around 500 lines. 720 would likely be a decent compromise for churches looking to keep file sizes smaller. Of course, some cameras will allow 720p or 720i (progressive or interlaced). Again, you have to weigh quality against size. If you're planning on recording and selling baptism and wedding videos, use 1080 at 24fps for that cinematic feel. If you just want to record the service for shut-ins, use 720 at 30fps and burn it to a DVD, and then ask yourself why you bought the camera in the first place. If you really don't care, edit the video and then save it for email (240 lines of blurriness). Now you can put the video on a CD and really wonder why you bought the camera.

Best advice: get as much of the video as you can onto Youtube as quickly as you can. Save originals if you need to, but Youtube allows you to download mp4s of the video. If you only want to put the sermon online, consider just recording the sermon. A decent mic is less than $100. A decent camera with an input for a mic is less than $500. Take the card out, upload, delete, and set for next week. If you have that amazing camera, use it for making your own show or for wedding memories to be edited by a pro.

 

Embedded Google Photo Folder! Almost as good as an image gallery at a fraction of the time needed. Also Documents!

 Embedded One Drive Folder, not as a grid.