Dead Armadillo Media

White Dove Fellowship is a large non-denominational church in the suburbs of New Orleans. I was the staff Media Director for 12 years and a volunteer prior to that for 4 years.

 

I came on staff 1998. One of the first things I did was to gain control of the whitedove.org domain, which was being held by a former member of the church. Fortunately, I did not get a screen shot of that version of the site. Even by the standards of the day, it was quite simplistic. He coded it by hand and it showed.

The result of my first redesign was hand coded. I had done some html coding at my previous job. I put those limited skills to use. It was completed and online in 2001.

2 years had passed and the site was do for a make over. We had recently gotten MS Office. Office included FrontPage, an archaic WYSIWYG HTML editor. I was completely unfamiliar with the program, but that was all I had at my disposal at the time. I later moved to Adobe GoLive and this was the result. My goal was to have other staff members write stories and post directly to the site. But GoLive was not the tool for that. I later found Contribute from Macromedia. Unfortunately, I had moved the site to a Linux/Apache based server and Contribute would not work. I had to find another solution.

 

I started to look for a solution. I found that a "Content management System" or CMS would do the trick. there was Drupal, WordPress, Xoops, Mambo. I looked a them all and settled on Mambo. Mambo is set up to be configured interchangeable templates or styles. I too the default style, called SolarFlare, and made it into the 2004 site

 

In May of 2006 I decided that the site needed a new look. I decided this because many people that had chosen Mambo was using the default template and it diminished the impact of our site. Meanwhile, back in November the core of the development team for Mambo decided to leave Mambo and start a new system based on the Mambo code. since then they have just about rewritten all of the old out dated Mambo code to create Joomla! (the exclaimation point is part of the name. I may be referred to as "J!" as well). At this same time that I decided to redesign the site I decided to move it (and others) to a new hosting company and migrate everything over to Joomla! (that exclamation point is for emphasis on dumb moves). One of the years most knuckle head ideas can be read about here.

 

The site actually consists of around 5 sites. Each a subdomain of the main site whitedove.org.

Greatcommissionfellowship.org

School of Practical Ministry.

This site consists of two sites. The main information site and an eLearning site using Moodle. I created Joomla template based on the Moodle template.

LibbyMille.com

Libby Mille' is a performance artist and daughter of the Senior Pastor Mike Mille'.

Wounded-Warrior.org

CivicOutreachCenter.com

Promotion and donation site for WDF's residential rehab program.

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