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Volunteer Ministry Webmaster / Web Designer Needed

Please Read All This Information Carefully Before Contacting Us!

Do you have excellent web design skills and believe you have a calling from God to use those skills to advance His kingdom and the cause of Jesus Christ? If so, Crossway Online Ministries can provide you with a place to use your talents and gifts as a ministry. We view this position as being a web missionary with ministry as the primary motivation. The successful webservant will have a strong desire to serve God, an evangelistic heart, and a willingness to provide their own support until the ministry becomes self supporting.

Crossway Online Ministries is looking for a grace filled, very conservative, evangelical webservant to join our ministry.  You will design and maintain our ministry websites as well as design and maintain websites for our design ministry for other Christians in a volunteer capacity until we can generate sufficient funds through the ministry advertising projects to support the ministry and pay salaries. This is a ministry position and will be a proprietary position requiring that you only design and represent our ministries. A house divided against itself cannot stand. This is a ministry position - we are not looking for a web designer to outsource to! You will be joining us as a member of our overall ministry.

Background
Our Online Ministries have been a labor of love for me. I have had the parent ministry going now since 1987 and we went completely online when I became medically homebound a little over 18 months ago. Our ministry has always been to this point bi-vocational with my wife and I providing nearly 100 percent of its support. I am currently devoting about 80-95 hours a week to the ministry though that certainly won't be expected from the webservant. However, we will require daily contact and a minimum of 25 design hours per week plus up to five hours of administration until we can develop this position into a salaried position.

Key to the position is complete agreement with our Statement of Faith and Beliefs (This is not negotiable since we believe these are basic scriptural precepts) and a proprietary commitment to design and maintain sites only for the ministry. We are not looking for a web designer to outsource to. We are looking for someone to join our ministry who feels they have been called of God to serve in a bi-vocational capacity doing the work of the Lord through their web skills.

We are now a well behind in the development of our online ministries. I have been burned three times by "Christian" web designers. None seemed to want to do this as a ministry let alone bi-vocationally. If your goal is to have your own web design business, please don't respond. As we mentioned, we are not looking for a web designer to outsource to, we are looking for someone to join our ministry and design for us as our webservant.

We are currently using Mambo Open Source software for our portal. Here is the base site http://ecrossway.com It needs considerable customization to meet our needs but it shows the basic features. Some components and modules also still need to be added. This portal will be replaced by the custom designed portal. We are also using Mambo for our Design site http://crosswaywebdesign.com and will use this same design for the hosting ministry - http://crosswaywebs.com 

Minimum Requirements
Commitment to evangelism through web services. Ability to hardcode in ASP, PHP, and HTML variants. Knowledge of databases, in particular MySql/MSSQL, phpMyAdmin, and CGI would be needed. You must have the ability to install software on the servers and manage databases using phpmyadmin. 

While most web design sites we will do for others will be primarily basic sites, our ministry sites are complex database driven sites. The webservant will also need to be able to produce graphics including banners and logo's. Ability to develop online audio services via the website is also preferred for providing online sermon resources and such for pastors. Further, the webservant would need to be able to develop in accordance with W3C and W3C CSS standards.

Here are the basics of what we need.

1. All sites need to be done in accordance with W3C standards including W3C CSS to maximize cross browser support, sites that load very fast, and to make updates and changes easier. http://www.w3.org/

2. All web design work would be private labeled under our name with the following footer on all sites created:
Site designed and maintained by Crossway Web Design a ministry of Crossway Online Ministries (hyperlinks added for both) This will help promote both sites and provide a dual opportunity for folks to see our web design links since it is included on the portal. Additionally, links to our web hosting will also be added in the same manner if we are hosting the site.

3. We want to provide top quality sites at the lowest prices possible. It is our desire to help as many Christians as possible to have professional sites so that Christians can support Christians instead of using services like tripod and geo cities which only promotes them and their anti-Christian agenda's

4. Payment: Although this is initially a volunteer position with the ministry until we can establish a salary that the ministry can cover, we will provide a commission on client design work at 50% to the webservant and 50% to us to help with advertising and promotion and overall ministry support. We will aggressively promote the web design services. The webservant will be required to assist in marketing and promotion.

5. We only provide design work for Christians who agree with our Statement of Faith and Beliefs which will be accessible on all our ministry sites.

6. All sites we design must have some evangelistic content.

7. We are trying to develop the worlds most comprehensive Christian portal. (See http://ecrossway.com) It is a daunting task. We want everything to be as automated as possible, very customer friendly, very fast, and if possible the ability to access information across local directories and domains with a centralized database. For example, we will have several directories on the portal. We want at a minimum a Christian Web Directory (non-business), Christian Business Directory, Family Friendly Business Directory, and a Remnant Directory. These will all have the same structure and categories. The only difference from a design standpoint will be the name.

It would be nice to have the ability to have a centralized form that folks fill out and select one or more directories they want to be listed in based on the requirements of the particular directory. Then, if possible have the ability to transport all these directories into another site so that we have multiple directories on multiple sites. For example we would have those directories with the same structures on the portal, the web hosting site, ISP site, Forums site etc. Since each of these have different domains it produces reciprocal links for each domain for both that domain and the people that link to it.

We would prefer someone especially gifted and able to code it all on their own. However, we are not opposed to using pre-written software that you can customize. The good thing about all this is that all sites will have a similar look and feel so once one is done, the rest will be simpler.

We want to add to our projects:

A comprehensive Christian Search Engine
Built in rotating banner and text ads
A comprehensive built in advertising system - classifieds
About 12 top sites programs (all identical except the name (http://aardvarkind.com free software just need customization),
Multiple Directories with a rate and review feature as well as a Business directory offering free and paid listing services
A Mega Christian forums section based on PhBB ( I already have the forums set up but need customization and a front end developed.)

This is all supposed to be tied to a single very efficient, high speed database so people advertising in one place could post free links in another without having to enter common data again.

If you are still interested after reading all this let's get together.

I look forward to hearing from you if you believe you are qualified and want to do this as a bi-vocational ministry. If you have thoroughly read all this information you may email me to discuss it further at admin@ecrossway.com

May The Lord Bless You In Your Online Service To Him

Bro. Rick Stoneking
Owner/Operator
Crossway Christian ISP & Christian Resource Center
http://www.crosswayisp.net
P.O. Box 4379
Ocala, FL. 34478-4379
775-254-1996

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