Faith and Web

I’m of two minds about website Content Management Systems (CMSs). On the one hand, they make getting information into a site much easier. You don’t have to know HTML (let alone PHP, etc., etc.) to use one. On the other hand, they are limiting and (worse) they are seductive.

The idea of a CMS seems to particularly appeal to the people who drive me the craziest in the web universe. I’m talking about those who believe that even though they can’t do a website themselves that doing a website should be easy. Not just that is easy, but that it should be easy. So it’s the webmaster’s fault when inevitably it’s not? A webmaster doesn’t really have that much value?

I’m tempted to go into a major rant here. At times such people have led me to call CMSs the devil’s handmaiden. But suffice it to say, they are even more toxic when they convince others of their position. They will say with great authority in their voice, “All you need is a good content management system.” Ministers and Board Presidents are particularly vulnerable to such authoritative nonsense.

I’ve actually had to back several groups out of CMSs, including one very large one. By large, I mean thousands of pages. It was incredibly expensive for them to do this (much more expensive than the initial costs), and they chose to return to a mostly static site. But two years later they are still happy.

The heart of the issue here isn’t whether CMSs are inherently good or bad. It’s the extremes. As with most things in life, the middle way holds the key. Use a CMS wisely, and it’s a beautiful thing. They can make the difference between having a website or not. Or they can enhance a healthy site. However, I expect I’m preaching to the choir here, since blog software is arguably a stripped down, highly focused type of CMS.

In the final analysis, what really matters is your site and its stakeholders. What will work best for them, if anything? Hint: there are no easy answers.

Why and Whither Drupal?

After doing fairly extensive research, I’ve concluded that for now, for my particular congregation, Drupal would be a helpful CMS to at least augment our website – particularly to build the community that’s already there.

We’ve got a fair number of geeks in the congregation, so if I set it up and am hit by a bus, someone else can continue to do the not inconsiderable backend work – securing and upgrading it in particular. It’s also open source, and the software itself costs nothing.

The other open source CMS I’ve played with is Joomla. I like it a lot too, but Drupal has been around longer, and I gravitate to the greater sense of stability. However, for me the biggest difference between the two is that Joomla starts out with lots of bells and whistles, while Drupal you build out with modules. The core program is quite simple.

Further whetting my Drupal appetite was Dan Harper’s call for “Unitarian Universalist geeks [to] commit themselves to maintaining a subset of Drupal” and Scott Well’s response.

Like Scott, I recently discovered and loved the Geeks and God podcast series about Drupal. I highly recommend them for church geeks considering or using Drupal. Alas, Geeks and God is going on a brief hiatus. But if you listen to later episodes (e.g. the most recent, which is excellent for other reasons), they sometimes have more Drupal hints.

In any event (drum roll) here is My Drupal Playground. I won’t guarantee that it will continue to work, since this is the place where I can be as bad as I want to be. While you could in theory subscribe to the feed, I’d advise against it. Even I’m not subscribing to it. I’m just using the blog to jot down quick notes to myself as I learn the peculiarities of Drupal.

One final note for other Drupal enthusiasts: Drupal 6 should be released in the next month or two. For a project like building a subset, we’d probably be better off to postpone getting serious until it’s out and we can assess it. But I, for one, am eager to get going. So happy Drupaling, y’all, and may some of us build something the rest of us can put to good use.

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I don’t have many web heroes, but Jeffrey Zeldman is one of them. Zeldman has been a web pioneer in many ways, but is best known as a constant, clear and effective advocate for web standards. In its most recent issue, Business Week just dubbed him the King.

For those who aren’t well acquainted with web standards, the article is a surprisingly good place to start. It gets right to the nub of why standards matter so very much, and has leads to some of the best resources.

For those who are well acquainted with web standards, it’s a helpful piece to point out to others – those who don’t understand, aren’t interested, and (often inadvertently) are standing in the way. As Zeldman himself points out, “At the least, its publication in Business Week will command some business people’s attention, and perhaps their respect.” I expect the same is true in the non-profit and even the church world.

Congratulations, Zeldman, and keep up the great work.

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Our church has done a weekly email for almost eight years now. In the main, it’s been a great success. However, the last few years we’ve been haunted by formatting issues.

The crux of the problem is that most church members and staff don’t understand how their email clients work. Thus what looks fine on their machines can be a mess on someone else’s. This is particularly true for something like our weekly email, which is initially built in Microsoft Word. Plop the document into Outlook with HTML email turned on, and the results are a disaster. While we know how to stop this problem (turn HTML off and plain text on), we’re at risk every time staff or computers change.

Enter Constant Contact, one of the best-know email marketing services. One of our Communication Committee members happened across it some months ago and signed up for a free trial. Committee members experimented with it and we were impressed. However, we were busy and forgot about it, until the end of the fiscal year came round. When we had a little extra money, one of the co-chairs shrewdly suggested that we dive in.

We did, and the results have been even better than we had hoped. Church members love it, and (surprisingly enough) in many ways it’s easier to produce than a text email. Moreover, on Websters, the listserv for UU webmasters, a couple of people who have been using it for much longer than us (including Dean Goddette — thoughts, Dean?), recently wrote that they too have been very happy with Constant Contact.

If you, like us, have been hovering on the edge of using an HTML email service, I’d recommend giving it a try.

Why Do I Recommend It?

• Both church members and committee members really like it.
• Many think it’s attractive. I’m actually not crazy about the way it looks, but that’s probably just because I’m an HTML snoot. More to the point, I’m clearly in a minority. And really, I don’t think it’s bad. In fact, it’s easier to read than the old text version. My aging eyes appreciate the larger font.
• Managing subscribers is amazingly simple. It only took me about 15 minutes to import our list, and adding new subscribers is a breeze. In fact, they can easily do it themselves…
• I followed Constant Contact’s simple directions, and we now have a nifty newsletter sign-up box on our home page. Not only that, it turns out to be rather clever. I tested it and it knew I was already a subscriber; it refused to let me sign up twice and spam myself.
• Unsubscribing is equally easy for the end user.
• While designing a template for the look-and-feel isn’t the easiest, comparatively speaking it is. In my professional life, I use a comparable service, and Constant Contact’s interface is considerably more intuitive.
• Once the template is set up, it’s easier to produce than plain text emails.
• The company is geared to small businesses, and nonprofits.
• It’s relatively inexpensive. One year’s service is under $300 for us.
• A user can receive it in plain text if they’d prefer or if they have a firewall that prevents HTML email.

The Drawbacks?

• It’s an ongoing cost. But compare it to other ongoing costs, such as the Yellow Pages, and the value becomes more obvious.
• The WYSIWYG interface can be temperamental. We had one link that absolutely refused to match others. I finally had to go in and force its hand using raw HTML.
• I’m told that when producing it, response time can be incredibly slow on some machines.

The Bottom Line

If you’re interested in it and think it might meet your congregation’s needs, give it a whirl. They have a free 60 day trial. So far, we’re delighted with it.

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A few months ago I read The Blogging Church and was sold. I’m convinced that blogs can be an incredibly effective tool for congregational communication. But I’m just one of my church’s webmasters. It’s not enough for me to see this potential. For it to take off, this understanding has to spread.

To that end, yesterday I met with one of our committees that’s likely to take the blogging ball and run with it. It’s our Children’s Religious Education steering committee. The committee is functioning well and many on it are very comfortable with computers. They generously allocated 45 minutes of their annual retreat to discussing this possibility with me.

Because I’m such an enthusiast, I wish I could report that they instantly understood what a blog could do for them, and were poised and ready to run with it. But given the larger world’s understanding and use of blogs, that was unlikely in the extreme. Thus, while that wasn’t the outcome, we made good progress.

From my perspective, the main work that has to be done is bridging a gap. Judging by yesterday, most of the gap is a lack of understanding of what blogs really are. It makes perfect sense. From my perspective, even the definition of “blogs” is a rapidly moving target. I think back to 1999, when I first learned I was already doing a “weblog.” I’d been collecting web links of interest to others in my profession, and thought of my posts as “web news.” I’d been doing it for a while. I just didn’t know it was called a weblog (what later became shortened to blog).

Fast forward to today, when the definition is more meshed with a new breed of software that generates blogs, including another very powerful technology in its own right — RSS feeds. Of course, that’s a technical perspective. Add to this mix the perception of blogs, and you get to the crux of the gap we were trying to bridge yesterday.

The Big Barriers

It turns out there are three big barriers we face, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other churches face them too.

Blogs are perceived as online journaling. Of course, much of the blogosphere is just that. But for someone like me, that’s never been the primary appeal of blogs. The vast majority of blogs I subscribe to I still think of as “news.” This was an enormous eye-opener for the committee. When I mentioned my original news blog, one member said, “Well I’d be interested in a blog like that.”

Blogs are perceived as a “time-suck.” This certainly makes sense, and I think it’s probably the biggest barrier. Time is so precious these days, especially to committed church volunteers like them. Of course, they’re thinking of more traditional blogs, such as this very one that you are reading. Yes, this is a big time commitment for me. But another type of blog, such as one for Children’s Religious Education, should end up saving many people a lot of time, and wouldn’t be that big of a time investment for any one person. To that end, one person asked, “Can it replace the listserv we already have?” It’s a great question. And while I can’t be sure, my bet is the answer is yes. What I am certain of is that it can largely replace the listserv if they want it to — and clearly they do.

We don’t yet share a vision. This is the hardest barrier to cross. The members of this committee are, on average, tech-savvy. But tech-savvy does not equate with blog-savvy. Two people in the group clearly do see the potential. One of them (our Director of Religious Education) made it possible for me to be there yesterday. But we shouldn’t be doing a blog for the sake of indulging us enthusiasts. Even worse would be doing a blog for blogging’s sake. To do it right, this has to be a shared ministry.

Yesterday my church planted and watered more blogging seeds. While I don’t know how these particular seeds will bear fruit, it seems certain that in time they will. The barriers are much clearer now, and that means we’re more likely to get past them. It mostly takes patience and a willingness to communicate to become a blogging church.

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• The Dilbert Blog: Career Advice
  Dilbert’s Scott Adams offers sound and simple advice on how to achieve the extraordinary
  (tags: jobs)
• the power of search: driving traffic to your blog (a BlogHer recap) | Vanessa Fox. Nude.
  Includes great examples, some of which apply to websites in general (not just blogs)
  (tags: google search)
• Gratefulness.org - A Network for Grateful Living
  A tech resource for living with gratitude; try lighting on online candle or looking at the messages on some of the close to 4M that have already been lit
  (tags: spiritual-tech)
• SEOmoz | A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon
  Defining “Google juice,” “keyword cannibalization,” “link love” and much more
  (tags: search)
• 45 Best Freeware Design Programs
  First up (drum roll) — the GIMP
  (tags: graphics software)
• XRAY :: for web developers
  A wonderful bookmarklet for web designers; I’m putting it on all my browsers (except IE, where it doesn’t yet work)
  (tags: CSS layout bookmarklets)
• The best websites are useful and ugly: Gerry McGovern
  While I must, of course, dispute the “and ugly” in this title, he makes a point
  (tags: usability)

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It’s one of the easiest of web practices and yet I see it violated every day. I’m talking about the W3C’s guideline to make link text meaningful vs. links that say “Click here.”

If you send me text to post on the web including a “Click here” link, I can guarantee you two things. First, I will gnash my teeth and maybe even wail. Second, I will exercise my web diva prerogative and edit your copy. I will do what it takes to turn it into a meaningful link. Fortunately it’s not hard.

But first you might ask, why isn’t “click here” meaningful? The answer is the context. In a particular rendition, yes, “click here” makes sense. If you are looking at it in Internet Explorer on a monitor, chances are it will make perfect sense.

But what if you’re a search engine? What are you supposed to be indexing? Search engines these days are smart, but they aren’t that smart.

Or what if your vision is impaired and your screen reader only renders links for the site? That’s the way many vision-impaired people go through sites, because it makes navigating the web much more efficient. The result is your reader says, “Click here.” That’s it. Click to where? And why? There’s no way to know short of reconfiguring your reader and going into a laborious process of wading through whatever else is on the page. What are the chances you’ll do that? And what will you think of the site in general?

So how do you, the web editor, make the link meaningful? Almost invariably the text that really should be the link is in a phrase right before or after the offending “click here.” Thus, “Click here to find out more about my church” becomes simply “Find out more about my church.” Better yet, summarize what this “more information” is. “More information” is often equally meaningless. How about “Information for church visitors” or “Church FAQ”?

What’s the end result of this simple change? All of your very different audiences will be happy. A search engine will have something to index, the screen reader will report accurately what the link is, and the person on Internet Explorer 6 will not only understand it, but will understand it more quickly. You will have condensed and clarified where the link goes. You’ll have made the link meaningful. It’s a beautiful thing.

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About six weeks ago I received our church’s Virginia Grantham Service Award. I was deeply touched, particularly by the incredible generosity with which it was given. I forget what our wonderful Board President, Ginger Brown, said, but I know it involved my web work and some other more difficult tasks I’ve had to do at church over the years.

Then consider the person the award is named after. Virginia is one of my heroines – a long-time (50 year?) member of the church, who has served steadfastly with kindness and humility. A minister once said Virginia is an angel. It makes sense to me. I think everybody loves her, probably because she loves everybody. She’s our church’s equivalent of a national treasure, so to have an award with her name on it? I shake my head in wonder.

And yet…. I have such reservations about awards at church. While it means the earth to me, still I question the wisdom of this practice. I know that people are hurt when their work is overlooked. It’s not that they are jealous of the people receiving the award. To the contrary — they’re happy for them. (At least that’s the case for those I talk with.) It’s more that it can affirm in one more way what they already were guessing – that their contribution is not valued. From what I know, our most valuable behind-the-scenes workers are particularly at risk when awards are being given.

I hear there are other faith traditions where volunteers aren’t even told thank you and that’s okay. I’m not sure how this works, but I think it has to do with an understanding that God sees, and your work is done for God. I love this approach, although I’m certain it wouldn’t work in Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Would that there were some way appreciation could be given in just the right amount – not too little as is so often the case, but not too much either. I don’t know what that would look like, and I don’t know how a church can extricate itself gracefully from giving awards. Do you?

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My iPhone is now four weeks old, and, if it’s possible, I love it even more than when I first unboxed it. Each week I get a bit more proficient at its use, plus new sites and tools designed for it appear daily. Based on my experience and talking to others who have one (including a researcher adapting an iPhone to help sick children), I’m convinced this technology is not just an advance — it’s a breakthrough of the first magnitude.

Why the iPhone Matters So Very Much

It’s a tiny computer merged with a telephone. Thus I have a powerhouse in my pocket everywhere I go. The genius is in how beautifully Apple made such a powerful machine so small; in particular, it’s in how it feels and responds to touch. Its Applesque elegance is just icing on the cake.

For web developers and designers of all stripes, including those of us who tend church sites, the implication is obvious. We have to design or redesign our sites to optimize them for iPhones and their poorer cousins.

In the past, designing sites for cell phones and Blackberries was only a requirement for large or specialized sites; it was hardly a must for the rest of us. Sure, we’ve had geeks in our church who visited the site on their mobile devices in the past. But they were techies or business types who adapted easily to the end results, whatever they were. Typically they were surprised if it worked at all. Expectations were low.

What To Do

For sites like my church’s, the good news is that the expectations in this realm are still low. There’s no hurry to make our sites mobile-optimized. But the writing is on the wall. Expectations will change. Soon. My guess is within a year. To be clear, I’m speaking of the United States. The mobile market is markedly different in the rest of the world – particularly Europe and parts of Asia. There I suspect it’s been more important to design for mobile devices for some time now.

For now in the U.S., smart webbies will be taking this new reality into consideration. While we don’t need to drop everything, starting right now, I, for one, am thinking about our redesign – and I hope you are too. We were in the middle of a redesign in any event (a common enough reality), and it’s actually no big deal to do this.

I’m thinking about how best to make my church’s site work well on not just the usual suspects (the many faces of Internet Explorer, plus Firefox and Safari on a Mac), but also on generic web-enabled mobile devices and, of course, Safari on the iPhone.

The Specifics of Designing for the Mobile Web

I haven’t just been playing with my iPhone, tempting though that is. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time these last four weeks exploring the ins-and-outs of designing for them. That’s led me into the larger issue of designing for mobile devices. Here are the primary things I’ve learned:

• Screen-size is 320 x 480 (or 480 by 320) pixels. While the iPhone shrinks pages beautifully, when you zoom in enough to read easily, on many pages you have to keep scrolling left-right – a big no-no in web design.
• A finger is not a mouse or a stylus. It’s best to put padding around menu links particularly – otherwise you can easily press two links simultaneously or the wrong link.
• Use columns and blocks of text. When you tap a site to zoom in, it will focus on blocks.
• However, don’t make columns too wide.
• Keep total file size way down. I bet a maximum of 50K (including graphics) is what to aim for. The web can be excruciatingly slow on ATT’s EGDE network. Most of the time I use the wireless connection and that’s peppy. But when it’s not available, and the iPhone switches to EDGE, connection speed goes down dramatically, and fluctuates even when you’re in the same place.
• Neither Flash nor Java works (though it’s likely Flash will be supported soon).
• JavaScript support is uneven.
• Adhere as much as possible to W3C standards. More than ever, it’s important to separate both design and layout from content, so use CSS as it was meant to be used.

Since my church’s webbies have been good net citizens, and started to separate our content from design, it shouldn’t be that hard. Being graphics and Flash-heavy will no longer be an option, but that’s no hardship for us. We were already thinking clean and simple.

The big question for me remains: do I set a site up to sniff for iPhones, Blackberries and their kith and kin? My first thought was to use the CSS Media Type. That’s the clever way you can control the print version of your sites. While hardly any mobile devices seem to use the “handheld” media type, I thought the iPhone might. Foiled again. It doesn’t, and perhaps in its case this makes sense. Handhelds are defined as “typically small screen, monochrome, limited bandwidth.”

Nonetheless, it’s easy to do. See, for example, my simple PHP sniffer. This sort of detection makes it possible to automatically go to the mobile-optimized version of a site when you enter the primary web address.

Alternatively, do I give you a choice that you have to click on? Do I find a place for a link that says something like “Mobile Version”? That’s fairly popular lately and is often paired with a .mobi extension

Or is there a third way? Perhaps the site can sniff a handheld, but once there, it offers you a way to turn off the mobile look-and-feel? My guess is this third way is the best, though I’ve yet to see it done.

Whatever the answers to these questions, clearly planning for the iPhone and other handhelds now is the smart thing to do. So clean up your code and keep your ear to the virtual ground. The future has arrived.

Further Resources

Tools

• MarketCircle’s iPhoney: free iPhone web simulator for web designers; requires Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later
• Safari 3 Public Beta: note: on a Mac (even though it’s beta) it replaces the current version
• Customizing Websites for the iPhone: includes my homegrown php browser sniffer

Inspiration

• Digg’s iPhone version: a good design for blog / list type pages (and see their thoughts on why and how they developed it this way)
• Leaflets: an elegantly designed site for iPhones

iPhone Resources

• iPhone in depth: the Ars review: the most complete review of iPhone to date; very helpful
• Complete iPhone Links List: Apps, Hacks & Reviews: a helpful set of links, though far from complete
• iPhone User’s Guide (Manual) 124p. pdf
• Apple Developer Connection - Web Development for iPhone
• iPhoneDevCamp, especially the Keynote by Christopher Allen
• iPhone Dev Wiki
• iUI template
• iPhone CSS?
• Problem solved — Readable websites on an iPhone

Mobile Web Resources

• Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web
• Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes: Mike Davidson; requires PHP
• PDAs, Handhelds and Mobile Technologies in Libraries
• Mobile Web Site Guidelines University of Texas

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PastorHacks has recently had a couple of noteworthy book excerpts on spirituality and technology. The author is focused on how disruptive technology can be, particularly to spirituality.

I don’t disagree with her points. However, I think she’s missing something that’s terribly important to those of us deeply involved in technology.

Technology and spirituality aren’t antithetical. In fact, it’s quite possible to have certain kinds of spiritual experiences when working with computers and the like. Granted, it’s not easy, nor is it commonplace. But I recall times when deep connections have been made that wouldn’t have been possible in a world without technology. And I think in particular of the hours where self is completely lost in coding and designing web pages.

Are these not spiritual experiences? Might not such focus be a mind state similar to that of artists and musicians absorbed in their work? For me it’s not the same as meditation or prayer, but I define spirituality more broadly than those two practices.

And I expect I define technology differently as well. For the author, it’s simply a tool of convenience. For me it’s that, but much more as well. For me it’s not about the machines per se; it’s about how I am in relation to them and the reality they create, be it telephone lines, photo software, etc., etc. Technology is the backbone of the web, and for me the web is a calling.

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I’m starting to learn there are blog-charged days – days where even if you’re not blogging, the ripple effect of your words is quite clear. Today was one of those.

First off, I heard from Vincent Flanders of Web Pages That Suck. He’d noticed my mention of him. Holy Toledo! In my web diva universe, he’s a super-star. He literally wrote the book on dreadful web design, and I’ve been reading his stuff for years.

If you haven’t visited his site, be sure to check it out. Chances are it will cure what ails you. It’s bound to make you feel better about whatever website (church or otherwise) you are coping with at the moment. And, if you’re like me, you’ll end up howling with laughter.

Then my most recent post (Firing a Client) elicited a couple of surprising results. I worried one of the people I’m currently working with. She was concerned I might mean her. I hadn’t realized she was reading my blog. Wow. Not only was it not about her, she’s the kind of client that makes me want to do more of this work. Witness her taking the time to read what I write.

In addition, Lizard Eater had an excellent comment about the same post. She suggested writing a contract, and she clearly delineated the particular perils of being a web volunteer, such as, “people assume that since they surf the internet, designing web pages can’t be that hard.” Amen to that. She’s so burned, though, I wonder if she’ll ever do this kind of work again.

I know she’s far from alone. Putting these two responses together, I realize that a page geared to clients with easy tips on how to work well with us webbies would be helpful. So I’ll pull one together in the next few days. If you have any suggestions for the list, just drop me a line or make a comment below.

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