About this Site

Being from a technological background, when I first started to check out CEF^®, I asked for a web site. Although there is a home office site, I was looking for something that I could get some more local insight into. I asked Don about the web site and he even noted that they thought they needed one, but they are expensive, hard to manage at times, and there was no one to take on the project.

After another meeting where we discussed that some people did not think we were 'with the times' in the sense that we don't even have a web site or use technologies, we had a conversation about technologies. We agreed that some technology can be useful, and that a web site would be very beneficial since we could get out more information faster to the community. I volunteered to take on the project of designing a web site.

About the Design

I was not sure whether to make this new site look business professional like the nicely done home site, or to make it more child-like professional. The committee decided that since we are a child-centered ministry, that a web site that might appeal to the eye of a child would probably be the best way to go since people that work with kids might be attracted to this design.

Now that I had the direction, I played around with some formatting issues, colors, fonts, and all the other things. The original design contained dark blue and yellow and featured a centered block for the pages, but I finally decided to change the format into the one you see here with the menu to the side in the cartoonish looking design and the CEF tiled in the background. The biggest struggle was getting the logo correct since our local chapter name does not include one of our counties of involvement. After remaking the logo several times, I hope that part is done.

This site is written in PHP, which is a form of writing regular HTML webpages with a programming language integrated to run programs. Why use programming? Because many features of the internet now can be made much more interactive and easy to use with programming backing them up. For example, one feature that I added is the rotating phrases directly under the logo. I can input any number of phrases into an online database on the web server and it automatically keeps track of how many phrases are there. Every time the page is loaded, the program kicks in an grabs that number and selects a random number from 1 up to the number of phrases, and then it grabs the phrase in that postion! Once it has that phrase, it prints it in the HTML language so that it appears on your browser.

I hope you enjoy the site. I do my testing in Firefox 1.5, IE6, IE7, and Netscape 8. I highly recommend that your browser is up to date. If you notice any errors on these or other browsers, please let me know. You can email me by clicking my name in the footer. Thank you for viewing our web site.

-- Tom Murosky