Faith and Web

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?

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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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In the past, I’ve been scared away from adapting Google Maps by talk of the API. I had concluded it was for super-duper geeks only. It seems I was quite wrong. It’s for mere mortal webmasters too.

In next-to-no-time, you too can create a user-friendly map — and it’s one of the best things you can do for your congregation’s site. In fact, there are only five steps, one of which you’ve probably already done.

1. Get a Google account.
2. Sign Up for the Google Maps API. Pick a directory on your site, e.g. http://www.firstuunashville.org/directories/. (Hint: if you pick your root, you’re going to have to put the file in the root.) Click on “Generate API Key.” This will create a random string of about 90 characters. Hang on to that key.
3. It also generates some sample code. Using Dreamweaver or your web editor of choice, copy that code into a new file in the directory you chose and upload. Go to that page, and voila – you will see a map… of Palo Alto.
4. Find your church on a regular Google map, e.g. http://local.google.com/maps?q=1808+Woodmont+Blvd,+37215
5. Zoom in and click on “Link to this page” (on the right near the top). Copy the URL and get the latitude and longitude, e.g. 36.114035, -86.805607. Paste this into “GLatLng” function. Upload the code again and, there you have it - a map to your church.
6. You could stop right here, but if you want to add more features go to the GMapEZ page and click on Get Started. Follow the GMapEZ directions, and you can do all kinds of cool things. For my church’s map, I changed the dimensions to 550px by 350px and did the following steps:
   1. Just a map.
   2. Add a marker.
   3. Changing the Map Type. (I prefer the G_MAP_TYPE).
   4. Big map controls.
   5. Specifying an extent.
   6. Then I got really carried away and did a map with Multiple markers. I can’t pretend that this last map is terribly useful, but a web diva has to have fun.

One tip…. After I got the map working, I made backup copies of the files before going on to a step that might mess things up. I uploaded and tested after each step to be sure all was well.

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At times I hear people say that having the congregation’s mission statement on the home page is a waste of space. My inclination is to agree. Mission statements appeal to me about as much stale toast. But this Monday I had one of those ah-ha moments.

Our church is redoing its mission and vision statements, and I went to one of the sessions on Sunday. To my amazement, it turned out to be pivotal, and 24 hours later its relevance to the website hit me. The smart people in charge of this process elicited what we valued most, and then distilled those values into one or two feeling words, such as….

• Acceptance
• Sanctuary
• Gratitude

Powerful stuff. A day later, I realized how visual these words could be – how they could translate into photos and images on our home page.

From a more pragmatic standpoint, mission statements and the like can help in search engine rankings. They’re typically full of keywords – hopefully the kind of keywords people are searching for. The thing to do is put such text high in the code where search engines will give it more weight, and then use CSS so on a monitor the same text falls in a less important place — either “below the fold” or outside the “hot zones” of eye-tracking studies.

Four days later I’m itching to do a redesign. But I must be patient, and wait for our mission statement to be finalized.

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Update: Based on feedback, I’m expanding this list. See the updated Checklist for Church Website Content.

Do you frequently run across websites where it’s all you can do to find the most basic information? I do. More days than not, I have to go on Easter egg hunts through a wide variety of sites, including congregational ones.

Of course, I’m much better at spotting missing information on sites that I have no responsibility for. It’s all too easy for a webmaster like me to get caught up in the razzle-dazzle of design, headlines, standards, Google rankings, etc., and lose sight of what ultimately matters most: the content.

Elizabeth’s Little Blog just zeroed in on this issue – Things a Church Website Should Make Very Easy To Find – and she’s a user. Such feedback is a treasure to an insider like me. To her list, I would add items like a phone number and an address. Here’s my checklist.

Critical Church Website Content: A Checklist

For Potential Visitors and Newcomers

• Contact information. This includes an address with the city and zip, a phone number and an email address.
• A summary of your beliefs. If you belong to a denomination or similar umbrella organization, is that clear?
• A staff directory.
• A map and directions.
• A brief biography of the minister.
• The size of the congregation.
• What newcomers can expect when they visit.
• Service times.
• Childcare. When is it?
• Religious education for adults. Include at least a brief description.
• Religious education for children. Include at least a brief description.
• Other activities. Do you have committees? What kind of social justice work are you involved in? Include at least a brief description.
• What makes your congregation special?

For Regular Members

• All of the above, plus….
• A calendar. This can be surprisingly hard to pull off. If you can’t manage a regularly updated one, at least post a list of the broad patterns and major events.
• Policies and procedures.
• An online donation form. If people want to give money, don’t let the webmaster stand in the way.
• Paths to more information. For example, if your denomination has a site, be sure to at least link to it.

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Need some inspiration for your design?  Check out Tutorialblog’s Top 10 Church & Religious Websites.  The featured sites are even standards compliant.

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Yesterday I noticed this site was sluggish for a few minutes. I worried briefly, but then forgot about it.

Lo and behold, it turns out my service, DreamHost, was the victim of an Easter DOS attack against its name servers. Thank heavens for the “Happy DreamHost Does-Not-Sleep Team.” That sort of issue is out of my league. I count on them to buffer me from all of the Internet meanies. And they do. Cheerfully. Plus they blog, so I stay informed.

For a congregation, a reliable server is critical. Assuming you aren’t serving your site yourself, you need a host that is competent and has decent customer service. A couple of years ago, we had a host that was attacked by a Trojan. We told them about it, but they disregarded us for almost a week. Then they “fixed” it — but not really. It went down again. Several weeks later it was resolved, but needless to say we went shopping.

Now we use LFC Hosting. Our congregation has ASP as well as PHP coders, and LFC can handle both. We’ve been with them almost a year without any problems. I commend both LFC and DreamHost to you.

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There are few things about website creation more important and more intimidating than Search Engine Optimization - or “SEO” as it’s called in the business. If you want to make marketing hotshots cower, start talking SEO at them. Most will pale and try to change the subject. This is not without cause. Search engines are complex and their algorithms change with some regularity.

Take heart, though. There are about 20 core practices that haven’t changed significantly in a number of years. Moreover, chances are you’ve already done several of them. Of the remaining ones, there are a number of straightforward things you can do. It’s not a black art.

I have broken the core SEO practices out in a checklist. I don’t typically elaborate since that’s not really the nature of a checklist. Of course understanding more is going to enhance your skills, so if you are interested I’d encourage you to dig into the resources at the end of the checklist.

• Checklist for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Did you know that typos are one of the three fastest ways to undermine website credibility? The others are out-of-date content and amateur-looking design.

Typos are particularly off-putting to users who are new to the site. Imagine you are congregation shopping. You find two equally attractive websites for churches. The theology of both churches is similar and both are the same distance from your home. However, on one site you notice a couple of typos. Which congregation are you more likely to visit first?

Yesterday I subscribed to my own blog newsfeed. To my horror, reading it in a different presentation (Google Reader), I discovered three typos. While this will never be my strong suit, I am resolved to do better. And let me share some techniques with you, so you and your church webmasters won’t make the same mistake.

A Priority Checklist for Trouncing Typos

1. Have a good, reliable editor. Cherish that editor. Two (or more) sets of eyes are always better than one. Alas, this isn’t a viable option for my blog, but you better believe I always run copy for my congregation’s site past one of our wonderful editors.
2. Spell-check in Word. It’s a pain copying and pasting Word documents into blogs and content management systems, because of the nasty formatting code that is likely to carry over. However, in my experience, nothing else is as good. (If you know of something better, please do tell.) To shed the odious formatting, I use a series keystroke commands, so it’s very fast:
   1. Copy all with Ctrl-A (Apple-A on a Mac) and then Ctrl-C (Apple-C).
   2. Paste into a text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit) with Ctrl-V (Apple-V).
   3. Copy all from the text editor and paste into the blog or CMS.
3. Wait a day. If you don’t have an editor, postpone your final proofreading. Sometimes that’s not possible. But for someone like me, it’s a best practice. Try not to do a lot of stylistic edits on the final proof. If you do, it’s advisable to wait yet another day.
4. Read it in an alternate format. You could print it out. Or if your blog application has a “Post Preview” feature, you can use it. The catch with this is I often find things I want to edit, but then I do it in the blog, skipping Step 2. That’s fine, as long as I do one final copy and paste from the blog back to Word before pressing the “Save” button.
5. Read your copy backwards, one paragraph or sentence at a time. You’ll be less likely to start skimming.
6. Practice. Write regularly. The more you write, the better you will get. That’s actually one of my motivations for doing this blog. I love to write, but don’t have many opportunities.

The bottom line is don’t do as I’ve done. Please do as I say.

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Speaking as Middle Old person (ugh, what a nasty label), I must say more websites than not are ill-suited to seniors. What might be cool to a younger audience is frequently bewildering to the point-of-no-return to an older audience.

However, if you want to attract seniors (and I would think most churches would), it’s really not hard. With real estate, they say, it’s location, location, location. With sites for seniors, it’s fonts, fonts, fonts. In particular:

1. Make the fonts larger. Personally, I end up squinting at a great many sites. Then I will ratchet up the font size. That’s no problem on a Mac (Command-plus is a myopic dream-come-true), but not so with Internet Explorer on a PC. If I increase the text size through the menu bar, it works for some sites, but not others. When it doesn’t work, it’s because the fonts are sized absolutely – a big no-no in web design, but all too common.
2. San serif fonts, in particular Verdana, are easier for older eyes to read on screen.
3. For navigation, make the fonts even larger and in a bold context. Subtlety and artistry are not the order of the day here.
4. Increase the line spacing. I typically use a CSS line-height of 1.6 (which means 1.6em or 160%).
5. Keep Flash and other animation to a minimum.
6. Make it easy to donate money. Don’t discreetly bury donation and pledge forms.
7. Have content that’s of interest to older people. Our seniors particularly like the sermons we keep on our site. And when we have a senior’s brunch, it’s easy to take photos and make a web album. The more ambitious could do things such as video interviews of the oldest members and stream them, which would also have great historical potential. Or just ask seniors what they would like on the web and then do it. Really, it’s that simple.

For more information and references (though ironically, I find it a bit hard to read), see the March, 2007, UI Design Newsletter.

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