The History of This Web Site!

I wanted to use this space to give my thanks to the many people that help make this site possible.  I thought I would start with a little history of this website. This site started in 1998 by Ross Hanshew who wanted to get the valley church of Christ online and get the bulletins online to share with people.  

In 2006 while I was in winter break I though it would be a fun project to play around with some web designing and surprise my father with a shiny new site idea.  The project became a surprise to me when he asked if it could go live by the new year and on Jan 1st 2007 the new website went live.  One of the biggest changes was the idea of placing recorded sermons online.

In the  process of learning about various web designs and methods I eventually figured out how to create a web database and setup an online form or bulletin board.  Mid March 2007 I launched the Valley Church of Christ Bulletin Board.  The youth  and young adults of the church started joining in and within 10 months there were over 50 members and over 10,000 posts on it.   The excitement of the bulletin board and the busyness of  school caused a lack of focus on the website portion of the site, and it was left un-updated for quite some time.

The next big step in the website came in mid 2007.  The web address had been until then located at www.akvcoc.org and was hosted by our local phone company.  The host needed to change due to a lack of space but we left the web address with the old host.  Thus www.alaskavalleychurch.com was born.  This move increased our usable space by a margin of 30,000.

The website was active and was full of content, but it faced one big problem.  I didn't have the time or energy to continually re-code web pages every week as new sermons and bulletins came out.  See at this time the site was all made up of separate pages each one laid out and coded every-time I made a change to it.   This caused me to search out a content management system for the site.  Content management is means that you create the look and layout of the site, and then input the information and it formats its-self.  This meant that lots of people could be involved in filling out the content on the site.

After countless nights trying one product after another and almost giving it up, I stumbled upon Joomla!, almost on accident.  The word Joomla is Swahili for "all together".  Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content online and nearly exactly what I was looking for.

It was a whole new world of online web making and it was thanks to the experience of working on the bulletin board that allowed me to eventually figure it out and again create a new site and completely change the look of the Valley church of Christ website.  The new Joomla! site was rolled out and replaced the previous website on Feb 2008.   This new site has allowed us to reach so many new heights in website development

I can't count the hours I spent trying to learn and troubleshoot the website.  But my time pales in comparison to the countless hour, days years spent by all of the programmers and developers that created or helped create the various components I am using all through this website.  I would like to write their names now here as recognition to there efforts of creating free material for people to use.

This new website redesign wouldn't be possible without the use of Joomla, a free, open-source, web content management product.  I would like to thank all of the hard workers that are behind making Joomla possible.

I would also like to thank the many authors that are behind the various extra components I am using in Joomla.

•  Martin Hess
  For his awesome work on Sermonspeaker the program that helps us organize and play the sermons.

This site really didn't take off until there was a Bulletin Board. I would like to thank the developers of phpBB for creating and supporting an awesome free bulletin board system.

• Spenser Hannon
  For his personal creation and direct assistance in the Arcade on the Bulletin Board.