One thing that I do not hear discussed is the reasons why you even need a website. In my consulting work, I will frequently ask if the client is sure that they need a website.
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Don’t Think You Always Need the Big Guns
written by jason.g
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Some of you reading this will freak when I say what I am about to say. You do not need top of the line equipment to serve your church.
Wait… What about stewardship, flexibility and quality? They are all qualities that I FIRMLY believe in. I do not think that you are serving your church if you use a $20 video package that you bought from a discount “sourceâ€. I think locking your self into an outdated system is also not wise. And finally, we are called to produce quality work.
Some of you reading this will freak when I say what I am about to say. You do not need top of the line equipment to serve your church.
Wait… What about stewardship, flexibility and quality? They are all qualities that I FIRMLY believe in. I do not think that you are serving your church if you use a $20 video package that you bought from a discount “sourceâ€. I think locking your self into an outdated system is also not wise. And finally, we are called to produce quality work.
But what if you are a small church that does not have $5,000 to spend on a basic video or graphic suite? What if you only have a couple thousand? What if all you have is $2942?
The Apple iMac G5 with 1 gig of RAM, a 2 GHZ processor, DVD burner, and a 17in screen is $1973. Add in an extended warranty (debate aside, that monitor is expensive to fix) and the Macromedia MX suite for $800 and you have just about every tool you will need.
You can edit music, video, PHP, CSS, images, and create animations. With this setup you could do just about every computer required media function that you want. Podcasts, websites, video, music, the list goes on and on.
You could go even cheaper…
You could buy an old Mac dual G4 desktop and a monitor. You are looking at around $1,800 then. Can’t get a warranty though. Or buy refurb and save a couple hundred on the computer.
The point is this, you do not need to spend $5000 on a computer alone before you even get to a monitor and software. You can do it for much less. And I would like to encourage small churches, who have a limited budget, to do so.
BUT…
Expect it to take longer and do less. As long as you can keep that in mind and don’t try to do a documentary on the system… you will be fine. Also, the one who works on the machine should have the one who approves the budget help them with a project. Then they will know what they are asking.
To go discount (read: not new) vs. the latest and greatest is a matter of vision and execution priorities. For example, we use a packaged software application for doing the overhead words and animation at my church because of our vision and church culture. To support this, we need newer machines that can support DVD drives, animate complex background graphics without slowing down, and record/stream audio/video to our website. Thus, we put more money into those PCs and the software required as we have them prioritized higher.
However, we often take the lower price route when it comes to volunteer workstations due to their lower needs and limited usage: simple email checking, word processing, spreadsheet/charting, and access file shares. For those volunteer stations that assist in supporting our media-centric execution, we place more emphasis on the latest hardware, the latest versions of the Adobe and Macromedia suites, etc.
The important thing to note is to always filter every decision through your vision and execution model “glasses”, bathe it with prayer, and you’ll be doing God’s will and be a proper steward.
James Higginbotham August 31st, 2005 at 8:08 am