Faith and Web

Yesterday I got a frantic phone call about our church’s website. It was a staff member wanting to know if our new alcohol policy was on the site. There was about to be an event on church property and she needed to let the people running it know our rules. She was delighted to hear it was, and I was delighted she’d called. I had always known having our policies on the web would be useful, and here was a great example.

I suspect it may be peculiar to my faith, or perhaps even to my church, but we are awash in policies and procedures. Give us a good challenge, and we answer it with a policy. Not that I think this a bad thing. To the contrary. I even enjoyed reading Robert’s Rules of Order. Seriously. When difficulties arise, and there’s a relevant policy, things typically calm down more quickly.

However, policies don’t do much good if you can’t get your hands on them. For many years our bylaws said they would be available in the church office. However, few of us had easy access to the office. Then even if we did, 80% of the time it was hard to find the needed document – and that’s assuming you knew it existed at all.

Enter the web. About four years ago, I started one of my major nag campaigns. “We need the policies and procedures on the web,” was my constant refrain. Gradually we started to get few on the site. And then, as luck would have it, I got put on a committee that was making recommendations about minor changes to our bylaws. I bet you can guess where that took us.

Our Bylaws Section 8.1.3 now reads: “A current and complete copy of the Policy and Procedures Manual shall be available from the church office and on the church website for reference by the general membership.”

Of course, as anyone who has been around the block a few times might guess, just having this in the bylaws still didn’t guarantee success. It just gave the web diva more leverage. And now, I’m happy to say, we have a fairly comprehensive set of Policies and Procedures on our site.

We also have developed a good process for getting policies on the web. The Board has a designated person (a past president of our congregation) who vets all policies, reformats them and gets them to me. I then take the original Word documents and keep them in a private folder on the web, while also posting a PDF version.

While even I will never argue that having policies on the web is easy to organize, let alone cool, nonetheless I think it’s one of the best uses of your time. If information is power, then this is a simple and effective way to share the power and promote a healthy congregation.

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I love good sermons and I love podcasts – but podcast sermons? Somehow that combination has left me cold. I tried quite a few early on, but could only take a few minutes of them before skipping on to something else. It wasn’t that they were the wrong sermons for me. They were just out of context, and they didn’t even have 15-second introductions.

While I’ve pushed several very talented ministers to podcast since then, you can bet it wasn’t their sermons I was asking for. I hoped in vain for something more intentional, not just repurposed content — something more like the Catholic Insider or Your Jewish Neighborhood.

Yesterday, though, my conviction about podcast sermons became less ironclad. Mind you – I’m still not an enthusiast. But I’m wondering if producing them might not be worth the effort after all. What gave me pause was a section of a book I’m currently reading: The Blogging Church, by Brian Bailey (page 142).

Bailey knows his stuff, which is probably the main reason I’m reconsidering. According to him, the reasons to podcast recent sermons are:

• Most churches have already recorded the sermon. (He’s right about my church.) And he says turning it into a podcast is relatively simple.
• A sermon is “ideal podcasting content.” It’s a talk, thirty or so minutes, and copyright shouldn’t be an issue. I was particularly reassured to hear his take on copyright. As a librarian, that’s my thinking about sermons too. I hear people worry about things like quoting poetry in sermons, but my understanding is that, as long as attribution is made and it’s not too long, that would be fair use.
• A sermon is “the focal point of the church.”

The other big issue is being clear on the primary audience for sermon podcasts. Previously I’d been thinking of a wider net (e.g., anyone interested in thoughtful religious discourse). But with Bailey framing a sermon as “a focal point of the church,” it looks to me as if the audience to develop them for is current and prospective members of the congregation.

Given my skepticism, it’s easy to guess where this task will fit in my priorities as webmaster. Also, there is only so much content I’m willing to beg others for. But the more I write this, the more I think our webmasters need to at least discuss the subject with our ministers and get their take on it. Who knows? Maybe they will be more enthused about a technology than us techies.

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Some churches use blogging applications like WordPress for their entire website and others (amazingly enough) use them for their original purpose – i.e. to blog. At my church, though, we’ve adapted Word Press to function as a super-simple content management system. Really it’s just an announcement board for committee chairs and staff. We’ve done this for at least three years, and it’s been quite successful.

The main reason our blog-cum-announcement-board works is because some of the church’s leaders wanted something like this. We’d actually tried this kind of technology a couple of years earlier, but it never went anywhere. You need someone aside from the usual tech suspects to be a catalytic agent. Our secret agent was the then Chair of the Social Concerns and Action Committee. She begged us to give her something so she could post announcements on the web. Once we set it up for her, she jumped right in and others followed suit.

It would be even more successful if the webmasters did more training of key people. Maybe now that I’ve graduated to Web Diva I’ll be more attentive to our stakeholders. However, we do have detailed instructions for newbies.

How We Set Up WordPress

We chose WordPress because one of our webmistresses was comfortable with it. I’ve installed it before for myself, it’s flexible about having multiple authors with varying degrees of control, and it’s fairly simple for them to use. Also, over the years, I’ve learned the rudiments of WordPress theme design. I designed this one – code name “Fire of Commitment.” You are welcome to download and install it.

• Fire of Commitment WordPress Theme (zip file)

We have WordPress and all its files installed in a separate folder. Periodically I update them. That’s my least favorite part of this setup. If you are even more averse than me to that flavor of geekiness, I’d recommend using WordPress.com or a web host (like DreamHost) that does it for you.

Then we parse the RSS feed and pull the headlines and blurbs on to the church’s home page. Actually, most people in our congregation never look at the blog directly. They just scan the home page. If you wish to parse an RSS feed, use something like Magpie RSS. Once you have a parser in place, you can also pull other feeds. That’s how we grab the associations’ headlines.

Do other churches have non-standard uses of WordPress or other blog apps, I wonder? If you have a moment, let me know.

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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.

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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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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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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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