404s are Inevitable: How You Respond Isn’t

“404 Page Not Found” errors are one of those curses of the web. Left to its own devices, your web server software will spit back a stark message that’s bound to at least annoy, if not downright discourage, your users. Some say it even affects your search engine rankings, though that doesn’t make much sense to me.

Certainly 404s can undermine users’ trust in your site. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for, they won’t link to it, and that could in a roundabout way affect your rankings. In the end, though, setting up a user-friendly 404 page is simply the right thing to do.

How to Set Up a Custom 404 Page

How you trigger your own customized 404 depends on your web host or server. For most of us this means checking the host’s documentation. In my experience, they all have it spelled out somewhere. Just search “404″ in their help section. What exactly you have to do will vary quite a bit. Some are as simple as entering a page to point to from the host’s control panel. Others will have you do a few kart-wheels such as setting up an “.htaccess” file. If you can’t find precisely what’s needed, contact your host.

What a Custom 404 Page Must Have

Once you know how to set up your 404 page, the next question is what do you include on it? Opinions vary. Mine is that there are three absolute requirements:

  • A simple apology. It’s important to be polite. We represent congregations, and should act accordingly.
  • Links back to the most helpful pages, such as the home page and the site map.
  • A way to contact you or someone else who can help.

If your site is over a certain size, include a search box. For many church sites, this will be overkill. If your site is only ten pages, don’t have a search box; just list your ten pages. If your site is 500+ pages, then a search box is a must.

One tip: if you add the following meta tag in the <head> section, search engines won’t end up accidentally indexing your 404 page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

Also, in case an example might help, here’s my church’s 404.

Further Information

For more in depth 404 information, inspiration and even amusement, there’s no better place than the 404 Research Lab. Even if you don’t need 404 help, the lab is worth a quick visit for any serious web geek or diva.

How to Have (or Be) a Happy Church Webmaster

Fatcat webmasterOnce upon a time (around 2000), I quit as the webmaster for my church. For a while the site was fine, but then the new webmaster began to neglect things. About a year later, the minister and a couple of other people more or less begged me to return. I said yes mostly because I had to clench my teeth before I could stomach looking at the site.

As soon as I’d tidied it up, I immediately found someone to replace me. We worked together for about a year, with me ostensibly training him. Then one day it dawned on me that I didn’t want to quit again – that it was a whole different experience than it had been in the past.

Same church, same website – so what changed?

The big difference, from my worms-eye perspective, was that I was happy. This morning I asked myself, why? What makes it so I enjoy it now? Here, as best I can tell, in priority order are the reasons it’s now a good experience.

  1. Appreciation. Both the website and its web mistresses are valued. We are often told thank you and, unlike before, a critical mass of the leadership understands that the site is important. The minister asking me to do this work was a clear indication of how much this perception had changed. The website was no longer taken for granted.
  2. A wonderful church. I love my church. I’m lucky and I know it. It wasn’t always so, and this I don’t take for granted. We aren’t perfect, but we are generally kind to each other. And almost every time I go to church, I come away knowing that it helps me to be a better person.
  3. Shared responsibility. I’m not alone. The person I asked to be my replacement has evolved into my co-webmistress, plus we have a crack programmer who is glad to pitch in. We work well together, and the pressure is never exclusively on any one of us.
  4. Great editors. Content is king. Our fabulous editors not only watch the site’s content to be sure it’s okay, they also provide critical information, such as upcoming sermon topics.
  5. A strong connection to the larger community. The Communication Committee oversees the site. It meets monthly, and we have a great time together, covering business and eating copious amounts of chocolate. We also have a Board representative, who regularly updates the leadership and can help us vet major decisions. For example, this year a new non-profit wanted to use us as a web host. We talked about it as a committee, and made a recommendation to the Board, which they approved.
  6. Laughter. It’s a rare meeting that we don’t dissolve over the latest. The big joke right now is that one of our editors emails dead people. But there’s always something.
  7. Clear boundaries, especially over content. One of the most pernicious issues for webmasters is a vague loosey-goosey sense that we are responsible for the content. For example, Board members have been known to say, “You need better information for newcomers on the site.” Our stock response has become: “We’re just the plumbers. Y’all provide the water that goes through the pipes. Can you send us this information and promise that you will maintain it in the future?” Actually, the Communication Committee shoulders this responsibility more than the webmasters. It works better when the chair, who isn’t a webmaster, says something like this to the person inquiring.
  8. Adequate policies. We have a fairly simple publications policy, which includes the website. When the going gets tough and nerves start to fray, we haul out the policy. It almost always helps.
  9. The work itself. I love creating websites. I’m hard pressed to say why (maybe that heady, almost magical, mixture of code and graphics?), though I know I’m not alone in this. At times, over drinks, my webmaster pals will marvel that the web is here at all and how we adore it. We can’t not do this work.

I wonder. Is this the way it is for other church webmasters? And when congregations provide a great environment for their webmasters, is it more likely you will have good sites? Or will you just have fatcat webmasters?

Del.icio.us Daily Blog Postings

For a while I’ve been toying with the idea of using the del.icio.us experimental blog posting feature, and yesterday I did the deed. So a little after midnight, when I was fast asleep, the bookmarks I’d made yesterday were posted on this blog.

In theory, from henceforth this should happen every day when I link in del.icio.us. For what it’s worth, I don’t link that often, being a moderately picky bookmarker. Typically sites I choose are utilitarian and related to constructing websites.

Del.icio.us 101

I expect most of you already know about del.icio.us, but in case you don’t, it’s a “social bookmarking website” – meaning that registered users get to share their lists of web favorites. It’s a great example of the extreme potential of databases. Take some simple information from many sources, get a critical mass of it, develop a few tools for it, and you can serve it up in an amazing variety of ways.

If there really is a Web 2.0 (something I question, given all the hype about it), then del.icio.us is my favorite example.

A Gallery of Inspirations for Church Webmasters

ChurchBeauty, a blog-like gallery of great church websites, has recently relaunched. How cool is that to have an RSS feed of inspiring church website designs?

Polishing Up the Lowly Footer

Are you looking for an easy way to improve your congregation’s website? Look no further than the bottom of the page – at the footer. I just randomly checked five church websites, and none had it right. Yikes! It’s time for a quick intervention.

What makes the perfect footer?

Convention has become that a web page footer is where your church’s name, address, phone number and a copyright statement will be. In other words, that’s where a lot of people who are in a hurry, not to mention search engines, will look for such critical information. Do you want to do well with Google Local? Then have your phone number with the area code in the footer.

While there are many things that need a bit of, um, sprucing up at my church’s site, this is one thing we do right. So take a look at the bottom of the home page for an example of a decent footer.

How can you create a footer that fits like Cinderella’s slipper?

  • Cover the basics. Content is king. Be sure to have the name of the congregation, the address and at least a phone number.
  • Include a copyright statement. Here’s a nifty trick for PHP coders, even rank beginners. Use the following code, and you’ll never have to update to the current year come Jan. 1 again:
    Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(“Y”); ?>
  • Visually separate the footer. It can be a change in color, a line, or a switch to a slightly smaller font size.
  • If possible, have your footer in an include file. Some day soon I plan to delve into the wonders of includes. They come in many flavors (SSI, PHP, ASP, etc.), and are exactly what they sound like – one file included automatically in another file. Almost every page on our site ends with the following:
    <?php include ‘footer.php’; ?>
    Just one tidy, simple line of code, and it’s done. Ah. A thing of beauty. And it makes the rest of the code so much more approachable too.

Gender vs. Church vs. IT: Does It Really Matter?

There seems to be more concern than usual lately about the ratio of men to women in various arenas. Zeldman is blogging about its reality in web design leadership, and then Church Marketing Sucks (coincidentally, I assume) started down the same path.

The broad trends that have been measured are:

What does this mean? I asked Mr. Web Diva. Ever the pragmatist, he said, there must not be many church webmasters.

But does it matter? My first reaction was, in truth, so what? But then my blood started to boil as I reflected on the possibilities that (1) women might want to be in web design or IT and are being held back, and (2) church doesn’t meet men’s needs.

I don’t know about the second possibility (though I remember that in Zen there were significantly more men than women). For the first, in my experience there is an ugly truth that the pundits seem to be tiptoeing around. That’s misogyny. In many of the IT worlds I’ve inhabited, it’s alive and well. Maybe it’s just an anomaly, but I doubt it, given what other women tell me. More likely, it’s hard to measure or I’ve just missed that part of the measurements.

Of course, it’s not omnipresent. I think, for example, of my church’s “Nerd Herd.” It’s six men and me, and I don’t detect the tiniest smidgen of sexism. But what woman or girl in her right mind, having heard the snide remarks that are so common among IT staff, would want to make a career of this? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the strongest argument for Web production being in Communications or Marketing and not in IT.

But back to the pragmatic: if Mr. Web Diva is right, it’s bad news for churches. The writing is on the wall: churches need good websites. That means we need good webmasters. Who cares what their gender is? What I care about is that we are all happy and fulfilled.

Adventures in WordPress Land

I happened upon a few great plug-ins, thanks to Daily Blog Tips, and just couldn’t resist the temptation. The two that have me the most excited are:

  1. runPHP
    Oh, the power. What a girl can do when she can shimmy a little PHP into her code, including….
  2. SRG Clean Archives
    Note my new Archives page. How I love a tidy list that generates itself. Not only that, it strikes me as easier to scan and thus more user-friendly than your average WordPress archive page.

How Long Will Analog Churches Survive the Digital Age?

Tony Miles, a “Media Chaplain” (love that title) in the UK, reports in Mayb2day on some provocative ideas of Andrew Graystone, the new Director of the Churches’ Media Council:

“Many church leaders are blissfully unaware that there is a revolution underway that’s every bit as radical as the invention of the printing press. Five years from now we will either have learnt to minister in a digital environment, or we will be its victims. Analogue churches won’t survive in a digital age.

“For a church, going digital means … learning to use contemporary communications tools like email and podcasting, rather than photocopying the weekly newssheet. It means developing a language and a mindset – even a theology – that embraces digital culture.”

I agree – up to a point. Five years seems a bit extreme to me. I suppose it depends on your definition. For faiths like mine, dominated by the well educated and well off – yes, he’s absolutely right. I wonder, though, about poorer communities, where faith can manifest in different ways. My hope is to talk to friends in churches and communities unlike mine, and report on my findings. How long can an analog church survive may be my first question.

And what do you, the blogoscenti, think? Do you know of churches still in the digital dark ages – that don’t even use email? If so, how long do you think they can remain that way?

What About a Small Mosque? Or Church? Or Synagogue?

I love Seth Godin’s blog. Mostly I love it for the unexpected places it takes me, but today I love it because of his Memo to the very small.

I often wonder about websites for very small mosques. Actually I think about small synagogues, temples, and Buddhist centers too.  My bet is their needs aren’t that different from my church’s, as long as they are in the first world. So what is he doing? Reading my mind?

His solution is TypePad, which he uses and knows well. From what I’ve heard, it generally has a good reputation.

Next time a small organization asks my advice, I will suggest they experiment with a TypePad 30-day trial and let me know how it goes. And if you are part of a small organization hoping to build or improve your website, why not give it a try?

Blogs on Church Websites

When I began this site, I didn’t think there were any blogs about building church websites — unless you count Church Marketing Sucks. After a bit of poking around on Technorati, though, I found a smattering. Two of the best are from the UK.

Living Open Source is a collection of “ramblings on faith, life, music and all manner of computer wizardry” by the Rev. Tim Hyde from St Helens Baptist Church, St Helens in Merseyside. As he puts it: “there is something very gospel about the whole concept of open source.” Before becoming a full-time minister, he was in IT for ten years. Lately he has a great series on “Blogging your church with WordPress.”

Churchblogger: Church Website and Blog Ideas is by David of the Whyteleafe Free Church, who “found there was a lack of practical advice for church website managers and church blogs specifically,” and set about to fill that void. He too is a WordPress user.

And so, come to think of it, am I. A WordPress user that is. We don’t use it quite as extensively on our church site, but nonetheless have been very happy with it for announcements.

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