"Transform your ideas into stunning visual stories. Create impactful graphics, web pages and video stories in minutes..."

What is it?
"Adobe Spark is a new app for the Adobe team that makes creating gorgeous, immersive one-page websites easy. While originally intended to enable the creation of high-quality magazine-style web "stories," these single-page creations can easily be used as a standalone website. Adobe Spark also comes bundled with a social media graphics creator and a tool to create animated videos. Whether you’re selling a service, publishing journalism, creating a portfolio for your creative work, or just want to build a simple site to share your passion, then this might be the tool you’ve been looking for."

What does it cost?
It’s free to use if you don't mind a little Adobe branding in the headers and footers.
$99 a year if you want to remove their branding.

What Adobe Spark can do:

  • The one page website: A landing page for your family and ministry
  • Single Webpages: Newsletters or other stories you might wan to share in depth
  • Video updates
  • Social media graphics

Strengths:

  • VERY easy to use
  • For web pages, no need for hosting plans or worries about maintaining a site
  • Newsletters or stories are more readable and visually compelling compared to eNewsletters like Mailchimp.
  • Access to more stock imagery
  • Easier than maintaining a website. Better-looking than email newsletters.

A Review:


An example on how you might use Spark…

  1. Buy a custom domain (ie: smithfamily.com) for about $14 a year. I recommend buying and managing a domain with this easy tool: https://www.namecheap.com
  2. Create a free Adobe ID and open up Spark in a web browser (Spark is mostly browser-based, but there are mobile apps as well).
  3. Build a "Spark Page" as a ministry landing page: Throw in a couple of pictures of your family, an "About Us" paragraph, one about your ministry, and links to everything important: your Facebook profiles, other social media, your donations page on AIM's website, a contact email, your Mailchimp subscribe link, etc.
  4. Direct your custom domain to your new Landing Page. Now everything people need to connect with and contact you is there at smithfamily.com - print that domain on your prayer card.
  5. Create your quarterly newsletter with Spark Pages. You can place a link to each newsletter on your Landing Page too. But you’ll probably share that newsletter link via a Mailchimp mailing list and on social media to get it out there. Each "Page" can be a private link (only viewable if you have the link) or public (searchable by Google).
  6. Try a video update using Spark video sometime, and play around with the design tools to create social media graphics if that’s something you enjoy.

You now have a pretty nice web presence with a custom domain name, and super-engaging newsletters. All for about $14 a year. And very EASY to use.