Whew! I’ve built a lot of websites, but none quite this interactive and intricate. After 6 weeks of coding, there’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s finished enough for my youth group to start playing around on it. Here it is: www.AlexandriaYouth.com

Some of the features include the normal stuff:

• Photo albums
• Videos
• Forums
• Downloads
• ParentLink Newsletter
• News announcements
• Youth group calendar

I suspect that once the students register an account and start crawling around they’ll notice a lot of cool little features all over the place.

The best part is that I worked hard to make the site as interactive as possible, a little online community where we can hang out and communicate throughout the week. Students can post comments on almost anything: announcements, news updates, videos, pictures, not to mention private messaging between friends or even groups of friends. A live shoutbox is enabled on every page, too, for easy chat between users on the site. I’m sure that’ll be a great way for kids to get to know other people in the youth group.

Adult youth leaders will have their accounts upgraded to be able to post front page news (thereby automatically emailing our entire youth ministry mailing list), access a private youth leader forum, add calendar events and more. Student leaders will also have extra privileges enabled for their accounts.

Although the site is open to the public now, I plans to add a couple more features as time permits:

• Private forums for girls, guys, and small groups.
• Event and trip sign-ups.
• The entire youth group music library made available as streaming audio. Instead of borrowing the CDs from the youth group CD collection, students will be able to listen to “check them out” online, create playlists, rate favorite songs, and more. (This feature will be available only to verified youth group members.)

I’m looking forward to interacting with all the students online! www.AlexandriaYouth.com

Posted on June 6, 2007