Website Guru Interview with Christian Computing Magazine, Part 2

In Part 2 of Steve Hewitt's interview with Aaron Winn, website guru for AmericanChurch, Inc., Aaron shares the insider's view of Radius Web Tools, built for ministry.

CCM: What led to the development of a web solution geared toward churches?

ACI: Unlike some church website solutions, Radius Web Tools was not originally built just for churches. In fact, Radius Web Tools was built in the early days of content management systems (nearly a decade ago) for a Christian university. It was so powerful and worked so well and met with so much success that local ministries asked for a simplified version they could use themselves. When these requests began to increase, the Radius Web Tools team spent the better part of a year building the user interface now enjoyed by ministries across the nation. Its genesis as a powerful software engine lends a great deal of stability and extensibility to Radius Web Tools that allows it to power websites of only a few pages with a single editor to its current record site of over six thousand pages and more than one hundred editors.

CCM: What makes Radius Web Tools so easy to use for ministries?

ACI: First of all, Radius Web Tools is a content management system. This means that it's specifically designed to allow normal people - not just Kligon-speaking programmers [laughs] - to edit their own site just like they might edit a word processing document on their computer. But what makes Radius Web Tools different than many other content management systems is the quality of its user interface. This sounds a little technical, but we all understand how important a user interface is when we get into a car that we're not used to driving and can't figure out how to adjust the seat or turn on the windshield wipers. When you get into a car with a superb user interface, everything just seems to work how you expect. We take this for granted every day, but thousands of hours of work go into designing a web editing interface like Radius Web Tools that is not only powerful but also easy to use. In fact, it's so easy that the vast majority of editors using it today have absolutely no training!

CCM: What makes Radius Web Tools different from other website software available to churches?

ACI: The real difference is the way Radius Web Tools balances power with ease-of-use. This ease-of-use allows even the most timid editors to add pages, blogs, podcasts, photos, slideshows, etc. without feat of "messing up the site." Its power allows more advanced users to edit in HTML, add Flash snippets, embed widgets, and social media feeds and more. Radius Web Tools also offers one of the fastest deployment times available. For ministries in a hurry, a new website can be deployed within 5-10 minutes of submitting the request. So, a ministry can literally be editing their new site within about a half hour of deciding to deploy their new site!