November 13, 2005

My Article on GodBit.com

I recently wrote an article for Godbit.com entitled God Always Uses the Latest Technology.

Just launched, Godbit.com is a project to nudge the Christian community to web excellence. The site will contain interviews with Christian web designers, articles, tutorials, and examples of good design. GodBit doesn’t just encourage designers to build pretty sites, it also encourages Christian designers to adhere to the standards, guidelines, and best practices as set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Nathan Smith, who runs a Christian web design agency named SonSpring and who also founded GodBit, says:

The majority of Christian web design agencies are using outmoded methods of coding to create websites that the rest of the world would scoff at. Basically, they are stuck in the 1990’s.

This is so common in fact, that the term “Christian” when associated with the Internet has become synonymous with “sub-par.” Without pointing fingers specifically, some of these practices include overuse of JavaScript, malformed (X)HTML, all-Flash websites, and over-dependence on tables for layout.

We realize that if anything is going to change, we need to stop simply poking fun at these agencies, and start educating them, as well as making churches and pastors aware of how they are being short-changed by doing business with such individuals. Our vision then, is to highlight churches, freelance designers and web agencies that are on the cutting-edge of web methodologies, in order to give others something to aspire after. We want to be a city on a hill.

Nathan approached me to be a contributor to GodBit. That means I’ll try to submit at least one article per month. I’m really excited about this.