Our Genesis

"Ask, and it will be given to you..."

I was not the webmaster for my church when our VBS coordinator asked for some help a couple of years ago. She wanted to set up a web site to allow on line registration for Vacation Bible School. She didn't want anything fancy, just a form with a dozen or so fields: the child's name, age and allergies; parent's name, address, phone and email; and emergency contact information. "Just have it email the form to me."

As a veteran web applications developer, I've found that what a client asks for is often not an optimal solution. I began asking questions.

I learned that she expected about 150 registrants, and planned to have volunteers enter the data from the emails into a spreadsheet. To me that sounded like a recipe for typos, so I offered to store the data to an on line database and provide an administrative screen to allow her to download the data as an Excel spreadsheet at will.

The on line registration was very popular: over 200 children attended VBS that year. The following spring I was asked to create a similar registration application for one of the church's outreach ministries, a children's Christian soccer camp. Again the on line registration was heavily used, as was the original VBS registration application a few months later.

This year other local pastors have asked if there was any way I could (economically) provide similar registration pages for their VBS programs. And so the seed for My Church Webmaster was planted.