An Unfinished Story: Rebuilding a Digital Foundation for the Church of God

As a website freelancer, I have the opportunities to preview new technologies the digital community is building. I’m always amazed by what it can make, and how it can improve organization efficiency and help people serve others better.

Three years ago, I had the pleasure to partner up with a brother to work on a website project with the goal to create a QR code scanning membership system for secondary school students to study together at the gathering place at the church. After about three weeks of working on the side, the site was completed! This project has given me the realization and motivation to help improve my community and the church to achieve its great vision.

I was then invited to help with the church’s website maintenance. What I thought to be a search engine optimization project became a full on website redesign. Brother Joseph, a bright and young UX designer who was my main point of contact in the church’s office were telling me the challenges he was facing when working with outsource third party website design agency. After some consideration, we took a bold move and decided to take it in house. I would say that is the time we have begun the church’s web ministry.

And so I went quickly convinced two of my friends, one remained a nameless sister, rebuilt the church website with a popular blogging platform — Wordpress. And in September of 2017, we successfully migrated that to our own Amazon Web Service server. Then in the next month, we restored the feature for the sermon library. At the time, all of the sermons are delivered from a local server from the Hong Kong church office, which can be slow and was prone to failure. We gradually migrated the many assets to the clouds, which is backed up across many regions around the world.

It is almost impossible to go through all the improvements we have made, but hopefully through regularly blogging, I can share with you all the exciting upcoming changes we are planning to make, all with the goal to help the church achieve its big goal and vision.

I include a list of events and highlights over the past for your reference and I will expand on them in the future.