A couple of months ago, a friend of mine, Zach Cheatham, and I decided to start a web design business together. I’ve always had a passion for web development, and Zach has an amazing talent for graphic design. I feel that our unique gifts will enable us to provide a broad range of services to our clients.

Our main goal is to enable churches and small businesses to have engaging websites that are easy to maintain and update. In working with churches, my experience has shown me that most churches don’t have a staff member who knows how to maintain and update a complex website, which is why I feel a company like Lamplight Media is needed to help fill this void.

Most people visit a church’s website long before ever stepping foot in their building. Although there are many high quality church websites today, the majority of church websites aren’t very inviting. Which is why I believe that churches need to view their website as an outreach tool, instead of just an informational tool. I hope that our work is able to help draw people to churches and consequently to Christ.

Our company, Lamplight Media, just launched our newly designed website today. I’m very excited about this new venture and pray that God will give us success as we work hard to develop a great product for our clients.

Please feel free to share our information with any churches or business that are looking to build or update a website. Thanks!

» Check out our new site

Our family has been extremely blessed by being involved with Compassion International. We have two adopted children: a boy in Haiti and a girl in Mexico. Compassion makes it very easy to send messages to our children from their website. They also send us regular letters from our kids. We started giving to Compassion before I had discovered Charity Navigator, but after reviewing Compassion’s rating I was even more impressed with them.

If you are looking to be blessed by giving to others, then I would suggest that you check out Charity Navigator to aid you in your decision.

They’re trying to promote the web as a great place for outreach. From their site:

“We wish to communicate the outreach potential of the Web to the worldwide church. We therefore offer a worldwide annual focus day – for Christians to discover the potential of this new medium.”

I think this is a great idea! It’s time for churches to stop being afraid of the web and start using it as a tool for the Lord.

Secondly, People2Pray is a website for managing and sharing prayer requests with others. I know this doesn’t exactly fall under the category of outreach, but I think this is just another example of people embracing the internet as a tool to help them grow in their spiritual walk. It’s also neat to know exactly how many people are praying for you.

Finally, I’m sure you may have noticed the little, blue icon in the top left corner of my site. I have discovered a website (Coming out May 7th) where believers will be able to share their testimony of faith. I think it will be a very cool thing to see how others have come to faith and their journey along the way.

I hope others begin to view the web as a tool in their outreach, rather than a hindrance.

I came across this set of photos taken by a Marine in Lima Company (Ohio) while on duty in Iraq. It was very interesting to see what war looks like from a soldier’s perspective.

Please continue to keep all of the soldiers in your daily prayers…

View the Photos

I also love to share different obscure bands and artists with some of my music-loving friends. Because of this, I was really excited when I ran across this website that takes all of the music you’ve been listening to in iTunes and makes a compilation out of it. It’s called the iTunes Signature Maker.

I recently compiled a sixty-second signature of some of my most-listened-to songs. I’d love to know if you can recognize any of the artists or songs. Let me know if you create your own signature…

[See post to listen to audio]

I’m not exactly sure what the word “Zeitgeist” means, but I thought this was pretty cool. Google has posted all of their year-end search trends with their corresponding dates to show exactly what people were searching for and when. At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal, but when you take a look at what events were occurring when people were searching on certain topics, it becomes pretty interesting.

I don’t have much more to say about it, but you can check it out for yourself…if you want.

I know many of you have probably already seen this, but I just couldn’t help blogging about this great tool from Google. This program will let you fly virtually anywhere and view satellite photos of any location on the globe. It is free, but it’s recommended that you have a high speed connection and a relatively high-speed computer.

One of the main reasons that I’ve been playing around with this program again is because of a great site that I’ve found: Google Earth Hacks. Other people have posted cool locations/sitings in the downloads section that you can click on and immediately view for yourself in Google Earth. You have to download a .kmz file that can then be opened in Google Earth. Very cool!

» Check it out for yourself
» View the House I Grew Up In (View it in Google Earth)
» View the Church I went to as a kid (View it in Google Earth)

This is hilarious! It’s a Star Wars parody that takes place in a super market. I thought this post would be appropriate today, considering Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith came out last night at midnight. The movie has gotten great reviews so far, and is supposedly the best movie of the three prequels.

I probably won’t go see it until all of the hype and crowds die down. If you’ve seen the movie, let me know what you think of it in the comments…