Of course you should.

Now imagine that same person has come to your website, instead of calling the church. Wouldn’t it make sense to have the pastor or church secretary answer THAT “call” too? 

Of course it would.

The answer is a Live Chat feature at your website.

You probably already know what I’m talking about when I say “Live Chat.”  It’s a great tool that many businesses on the web use for live support. But here’s what you probably didn’t know: you can get it fors FREE …and can be added to almost any website quite easily.  The live chat code you put on your webpage works with your instant messaging account and the instant messaging software you install on your computer (instant messaging software is free and easy to install too,  read more below.)

 

Pictured: Graphic of what my plugoo chat window looks like at www.sundaysoftware.com.  If you click the image, it will take you to my live chat window.

 

HOW TO INSTALL “LIVE CHAT”
at your website….

 

 1. First, you have to sign up for either a free Yahoo Chat account or a free Windows Live messenging account.  These programs are often called “instant messaging” software. I recommend www.live.com.  Go there and create a username and password, and download the free software.  The default set-up makes the program turn on and log-onto your instant messaging account everytime your computer turns on. This is good.

 

2. Go to either www.meebo.com or www.plugoo.com and sign up for a free  live chat application. It will ask you for your Yahoo chat or Windows Live chat username. It needs to know your chat username!  …so don’t worry about giving the info.

3. Next you’ll see a meebo or plugoo setup screen in your browser at the meebo/plugoo website. Choose some appearance options, then ’save’ or generate the needed code to install into your website. Copy the code they give you using your mouse.

4. Finally, paste the code they gave you into your website’s mainpage code. Upload your mainpage, and go to your mainpage on the web to see your Chat box magically appear with the formatting you selected!  (If you’re using wordpress, see my notes below)

One thing you want to remember to do when you have an instant messaging program installed is keep your computer’s volume button turned up. When someone sends you a message in the chat window, you will hear an audio alert.

A second thing to remember is to let your Yahoo or Live Instant messaging program turn on when you boot up your computer. If it’s on, it can tell people you’re available. If you have your messaging program turned off, people at your website will see a “not available” notice.

How it Works:

When you have a Yahoo or Windows Live chat account, everytime you start your computer and the chat application starts, it “pings” the Yahoo or Live chat server to let it know you are online. It also “pings” your meebo or plugoo account on the meebo or plugoo servers. “Ping” means it sends a short single saying, “I’m available!”

When the meebo/plugoo server sees that ping from your chat program, it knows you’re online and ready to chat. So….meebo/plugoo now “pings” your website where you installed the special code to say, “hey code, make a green light appear on this page to tell people I’m online right now.”  That’s how people coming to your website see you as “available online to chat.”   If meebo/plugoo’s server sees that your offline, it sends a signal to the code on your website to say “not available” and a red light appears on your website.

When you’re online and available and someone types into your webpage chat form,  their text is shot over to meebo/plugoo server and sent to your Yahoo or Windows Live software on your computer. (In internet terms this is called “relaying”).   Your yahoo/live chat software opens up a chat window on your desktop and shows you the incoming message. Now you can type messages back and forth with the person who’s come to your website.

Very easy, very cool, and a great way to REACH OUT in a personal way to those visiting your website.

Note:  You don’t even have to be AT the church to answer a chat request from your website. Anywhere you are with a computer, and have logged into your Yahoo chat or Windows Live account –when you log-in  meebo/plugoo will see that you’re logged in and tell people at your website that you are avaiable for chat.

NOTES:

Both meebo and plugoo work with virtually ALL websites. 

If you have a Wordpress created site that’s hosted on wordpress.com’s server (which I recommend that a lot of churc

hes do), you can only use Meebo. In fact, Meebo is already pre-installed. Just open up your list of widget and drag the Meebo box onto your wordpress site menu.  If you have a Wordpress created site that uses the free robust version of Wordpress.org and is hosted on your OWN website host, you can install plugoo as a plug-in.  See my example on the BOTTOM of this resource page!

Recapping:

1. Sign up for, download and install Yahoo chat or Windows Live chat from www.live.com

2. Sign up for either a free “Meebo” or “Plugoo” account and it will give you a couple of lines of code to copy.

3. Put the code on your webpage.

4. Be sure that your office or home computer is logged onto your chat account so people coming to your website see that someone is available. You’ll be surprised how many want to chat at 10 pm at night when you’re surfing Facebook!

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My original article about creating a church website in Wordpress has proven very popular, — just what the doctor ordered for many churches that have stale websites.  This post adds some advanced notes to that discussion. (Note:  that original article  points to my full article on the subject at http://www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm)
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Neil:  “Because that’s where an increasing number of your members are –everyday.”

Pastor Friend: “Our kids maybe, but our adults? It just seems so vapid, a colossal waste of time.”

Neil:  “Sigh….”

National Public Radio just released the results of their survey of their on “fans” who follow NPR on Facebook. (Yes, NPR has a Facebook page).  1 million people follow NPR’s Facebook page. 40,000 NPR fans responded to the survey.

Here’s what NPR’s “low-brow” crowd looks like:

NPR’s fans are Facebook regulars. Almost all respondents –96%– access Facebook at least once per day, and 80% access it more than once a day. According to Facebook, 50% of its users in general are using the service on any given day.

79% of the respondents were between the ages of 25 to 54.  69% were women.

 They’re regular consumers of NPR content, especially via broadcast. About three of every four respondents (76%) listen to NPR on the radio. The majority of respondents – 55% – listen to between one and three hours of NPR on air each day.

You can read NPR’s  full report at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128928306&sc=fb&cc=fp

To read my article about Why Pastors/Churches should take Facebook seriously, go to http://sundayresources.net/neil/2009/06/27/facebook-the-f…be-on-facebook

Sometimes, the answer is obvious, like the Wayside Womens Association webpage…

A favorite “bad site” from my “bad sites” article linked below.

The pastor’s next question is usually, “Neil, will YOU look at our webpage for me and tell me what you think?”  And I’m always glad to do so, as long as the pastor didn’t MAKE the website themself

Yes, there are a couple of things I look at OTHER THAN design issues (and Brittney Spears advertisements) that tell me about the webpage person’s “experience.”

btw…. I’ve posted numerous articles and blogposts describing what makes for a good and bad church website. You can start at www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm and then go over to www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm and www.sundaysoftware.com/good-badsites.htm for more ideas and examples, and bad examples like the Wayside Women’s site.

3 TESTS to determine if your webpage person knows what they are doing:

Apply this QUICK LITMUS TEST to your church’s website to see if your webpage person has a clue. These are such basic issues that IF your webpage person didn’t get these things right, you should question “what else didn’t they get right?”

1.   Is the church’s name, address and phone number on the homepage formatted as TEXT? -or is it only found as part of a graphic?  

 If it is text, a search engine can read it and catalog it. If it is part of a graphic, it can’t be indexed by search engines. 

A surprising number of websites don’t include text of the church’s address, which means your site doesn’t get indexed by search engines, –or they bury it at the bottom of the page where people can’t find it.

Test your church’s address on its homepage: If you can use your mouse to highlight the church’s name, address and phone number and copy it, then it is TEXT. If you try to highlight the text and it won’t highlight, then it’s part of a graphic. 

It’s important to have your Church’s Name, Address and phone number as TEXT on your home page so people can find your page. Example: If someone searches for “that church on Main street in Columbus” they won’t find your church on Main St. if the word “Main St.” is only part of a graphic and not also found in the text of the home page.  If they search for “Lutheran Churches in Columbus” your listing may be buried on page 3 of the google results. Why? Because search engines organize such listing results by relevancy. If you leave off the texts, “Lutheran” “Churches” “Columbus”, then people searching with those keywords are less likely to see your page. 

While you’re at it, list the pastor’s name too. Many people search for church’s by the pastor’s name.

2. Is there ”Meta Tag” information embedded in your church’s webpage?

There should be. Meta tags are hidden chunks of text in each webpage’s code that tell the search engine what’s in your webpage. The tags also suggest keywords to the search engine which help catalog it, …which helps people find your page when they search by keywords. Any webpage techie worth their salt knows to include these tags.

TO SEE if your homepage has meta-tags, do this:  Right click your homepage and select “View Source”.  This will show you the code behind your webpage. Look at the top of the code.  You should see the following tags embedded. 

 META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT= …followed by keywords that a searcher might match to find your page.

META NAME=”description” CONTENT= …followed by a two sentence description of your church and homepage.

TITLE=  …which is the official title of your home page.

The keywords and description meta tags should include the following:  your church’s name, street, city, state, denomination, pastor’s name, and other identifying information. Why the pastor’s name? Because experience has taught that some people don’t remember the name or location of a church, but search for the pastor whom they have met. (Tech note: these tags are created in the html editor.)

Search engines compare information found in the homepage text to information found in the meta-tags. Thus, make sure your meta-tag keywords and descriptions have the name and full address of the church, plus the pastor’s name.

You don’t have to really know what this means, you just need to know if your webpage person knows what it means and has put the tags in there!

3. Are any of your graphics and photos over 70k? 

Many novice or careless web designer don’t know how to properly compress graphics and photos. Oversized photos and graphics kill a webpage’s load time on slower connections. (By “oversized” I mean the size of the file, not the dimensions of the graphic or photo.) If you have a highspeed connection, you may not even notice the long load times, but your slower speed members/visitors will.

Test: Right click the graphics and photos on your church home page and select “properties.”  If any photos or graphics are over 70kb in filesize, then the person who put them there doesn’t really know what they are doing when it comes to graphics and photos.   No photo on your church webpage should be over 70k, and most should be quite a bit smaller since you’ll have other things on the page as well.

If your church homepage fails all three of these tests, then you probably have a volunteer who doesn’t know much about making webpages and helping people find them on the web!  They could learn, but is your church’s website the thing they should be learning on?

Many years ago my former church’s pastor mentioned to me that “Bob” was designing a website for the church using the church’s computer. I walked into the office and saw “Bob” sitting there with an HTML manual in his lap, –and felt we were in deep trouble. After two months, he debutted the site, and SAW that we were in deep trouble!  It was awful, but the pastor didn’t want to offend “Bob.” Two years later (and two years of hoping no visitors would see the site, Bob moved and we were able to rescue the site.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

I also have a “DESIGN RULE CHECKLIST” I apply when asked to look at someone’s website:

This checklist usually tell me a lot about a church site without having to look at every page. (I’m not going to mention “fresh” because that should be obvious.)

1.  Is the address,  phone number and other contact info or a link to such prominently displayed on the home page?  On a surprising number of church websites, they are not.

2. Is there a map to the church which I can easily find and print when I visit your homepage?

3. Is the homepage dominated by the pastor, photo of a building, or activities of the congregation?  (and I hope I don’t have to explain which is the most important!)

4. IF your church webpage has a calendar feature, is it being used, and/or left largely unfilled? What is it saying to members and visitors?

5. Is there a way to contact the pastor personally?  Or do you force all contacts through a generic contact form?  Pastor = Personal.

6. Is the webpage OVERLY-SLICK or “over produced” for the church?   This might seem like an odd comment, but a small home-y church should not have a website that looks like it is a hip-urban coffee house. Conversely, if you’re website looks stuffy and boring, I hope it doesn’t reflect your church!  Friendly, fresh and easy to update better than flashy.

7. Is the church website constructed with overly complicated scripts and dynamic page elements that ONLY the webpage person can work on?  If so, the day will come when they won’t be working on it, then what?   K.I.S.S. your church website so that other people can come aboard and keep it afloat. Read my article which specifically addresses this issue: www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm

Hope this helps improve your church website.

Comments welcome!

<>< Neil

www.sundayresources.net/neil

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Wordpress is website-creation software that gives churches a very inexpensive template-driven* way for a novice to create a respectable website.  With a little time and knowledge, a Wordpress-created church website can also become an advanced-looking and functioning.

This article describes the two options you have to build a Wordpress site. One of those approaches gets you up and running VERY quickly, but has some feature limitations. The other requires more expertise but is extremely expandable and customizable down the road.

*By “template-driven” I mean: Wordpress gives you a group of pre-made website designs, and you select the one you want. Then you type your content into web forms and that info gets placed into your site.

Wordpress’ control panel (aka “dashboard”) gives you many many features you can add by clicking and dragging the feature into place. Wordpress also allows you to upload graphics and photos from your computer to your site with a minimal amount of fuss (Wordpress will even compress and resize it for you).  No code experience necessary, though there is a learning curve. 

In Wordpress, you can preview and pick new templates at any time, and all your previous content is immediately updated with that new look. 

There are TWO WAYS to create a Wordpress website. One is ”Easy” and other a bit more ”Advanced”

 1) Easy…  You go to Wordpress.COM and sign up to use their online web creation tools.  You can create a site for free, then play around with it.  You can then pay them $15 a year to convert your site (yourchurchname.wordpress.com) to your own website domain (yourchurchname.org). This is how my church does it (www.stcroixreformed.org)

2) Advanced…  You go to Wordpress.ORG and download their free copy of the Wordpress software and install it on your own existing website.  From that point on, it works just like a site at Wordpress.com, except that you can add many more features and design themes. Wordpress.org has lists of features and design themes you can get from Wordpress developers at little or no charge.

When you ‘install’ Wordpress.org’s free software, you’re putting it at your website, not running it from your computer. When you simply sign up for a Wordpress website at Wordpress.com, there’s nothing to download; Wordpress.com does it all for you, including the hosting. Both options give you the same user-friendly “dashboard” that you access via your web browser to control your site.

Creating your site at Wordpress.COM via their online tools is inexpensive and quick, but you’ll be limited to the three dozen or so templates that they offer. However, if you’re planning a fairly simple site, this is the way to go. This is how I did my church’s website, mainly because down the road I wanted it to be easily managed by other volunteers and the pastor. They also didn’t have a web domain name or host provider yet, and Wordpress.com offers it cheap.

(If you change your mind some day, you can migrate your content from your wordpress.com site to your own.)

Either way, whether via wordpress.COM or wordpress.ORG, Wordpress has a lot of great tutorials, examples, and community support forums.

NOTE: If your church already has a website, check with your church’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) to see if they already have Wordpress installed on their server and can load it on your site for free.  Just be sure it’s the latest version of Wordpress.

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Implementing advanced features and design themes on your own Wordpress.org installed software…

If you have chosen to download and install wordpress to your website’s server, a whole forest of Wordpress themes and feature plug-ins can be found on other websites that can be installed into your wordpress software.

Wordpress is “open source” software… meaning they encourage developers to make themes and features for the platform.

www.themeforest.net/category/wordpress is one of the best places to shop for Wordpress themes and features which you can install into your Wordpress website. You can download a very sophisticated and easy to modify Wordpress design template for under $35 and then install it into your website.  (People will think you’re a web-genius.)   Please note: this approach requires knowledge of how to upload (ftp) files to your church website.

Look through the various theme forest categories and don’t limit yourself to any one category at themeforest because all the themes are customizable. Thus, you might find a really good ‘business’ template that works well for your church. How customizable IS each theme? Depends on what the developer gives you. Read their descriptions carefully. And Remember: one of the great things about Wordpress is you can change the design theme without changing all the posts and breaking all the navigation links!

Here’s an example of a really nice design theme I found in the business section of ThemeForest.com, which could be easily modified for church use…

One of the things I really like about Wordpress themes, is that you can PREVIEW THEM at your site, and if you don’t like them, you can revert back to the theme/layout you had before with the click of a button.

Tips on Customizing Your Wordpress Theme…

In Wordpress, you can add your own front page graphic, -replacing the one that came with the template. Just be sure to note the dimensions of the main “header” graphic which the theme is designed to display. For example, if the template’s header graphic is 600×300, make your replacement header graphic the exact same size.

When you install a theme, whether are Wordpress.com site, or your own installed version of Wordpress, often you cannot customize the fonts and link colors, those are locked in as part of the theme you have chosen. Check each template’s “specs” to see if those things are customizable in the particular template you want to use.  (As Wordpress software evolves, they are adding more customization options.)

Some of the themeforest themes have “slideshow” features you can easily install on the main graphic on the front page. For example:  http://themeforest.net/item/good-start-wordpress-design/full_screen_preview/77989 (also seen above).  This is a business theme, but could easily be modified to work for your church. I’m not advocating a slideshow as your header graphic… just suggesting you are AWARE of the theme’s design before you install it.

Below is an example of MY church’s website, which is hosted via Wordpress.COM for $15 a year. Out of their 50 some free themes, I liked 7 or 8, and chose this one.  They continue to add new templates and features to Wordpress.com hosted sites.

I am able to customize SOME things about the layout, but because we’re doing it the inexpensive Wordpress.COM way, some things are not customizable, and some things in this particular theme have limited layout options. For example, I wish the main header graphic is this theme could be wider and cover the top, -like most templates allow you to do. But I sacrificed it for all the other nice color/design features.  Give and take.

The nice thing about this design is I can change it with the click of a button on my Wordpress dashboard. All the photos, content and links will remain visible and functional, just put into a different layout.

The real key to the “look” of your site is NOT the template, but your content. Photos are critically important to making your site (and thus, your church) appear inviting and fresh.

The best part of our site is that we have a “subscribe” feature so that members can subscribe to automatically receive email copies of all new content that we post. In effect, it’s a free email newsletter.  Read about that ‘feedburner’ feature at www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm

For more church website do’s and dont’s go to www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm

To learn how to create a basic Wordpress.com website for your church, go to www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm

For tips on Adding a Donation Button and enabling a “Feedburner” feature on your church website that notifies church members every time you post a new message to your site, go to www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm and look down at the Feedburner section.

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NOTE: There are many OTHER web services that offer free or nearly free ready-made design templates and special features you can select from menus to quickly build a site.  Drupal.com for example. However, all of these services can still produce amateurish and lifeless sites with stale content.  Bottom line: you need somebody with an eye for appearances, and knack for writing.

Buyer beware:  Some web service providers offer simple website creation software, but the content won’t transfer if you want to change service providers. Many of these ”create a site” webhosts are also PRICEY. And some of the services look good at first, but might not grow with you over the years. Why?  Some web hosts contract out their template services to enhance their product to first-time buyers (ie, your webhost doesn’t own or manage the template services they are offering you). Soon enough, you could find their features aren’t quite enough, aren’t customizable, or don’t get upgraded because the service behind them is long gone. Wordpress has been around a long long time, is open source, offers its software for free, and has a non-profit foundation at its core.

There are a couple of web-hosting companies that cater specifically to churches with “point and click” approach to designing your church website. www.e-zekiel.com for example. Not cheap, but lots of features and support and they’ve been in business a long time.

I continue to like Wordpress for the cost, the free stuff, the ease of use, their support community, and their continuing commitment to improving their product.

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We bought the Olympus WS-400s at Office Max for about $60. It has a built in microphone, two recording quality settings, and 1 gb memory for up to 170 hrs of recording time. This unit is VERY small, -, it’s about 4″ by 1″ -or about half the size of a cellphone. It is very easy to use. Even has a built-in retractable USB plug so you can plug it right into your computer.

It records in the WMA  format (Windows Media Audio). On the high quality setting, a 15 minute sermon is just a 3 mb file. The tiny built-in microphone does a surprisingly good job of picking up the pastor’s voice. He lays it on the lecturn about 20 inches away from his mouth. He simply press the record button just before he starts to speak. The recording playback quality is good enough for the web. (The unit’s own playback quality is small and tinny on its own micro speakers, as to be expected.)  

To post the file at a website, you plug the recorder into your computer, open up a simple FTP (file transfer) program, and upload it to your website. Then, I take note of the file’s web address and paste that address in a file on our webpage. We use Wordpress to create our church site, so it’s all easy.

Now the question is, IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

Two months ago, the pastor asked for my help saying, ”The Consistory wants to start recording the sermons and put them on the church website.”  Our pastor doesn’t write out his sermons, so there is no text to post. 

I agreed to help, saying, “Sure, we can do that, but let’s also agree to revisit this decision based on ACTUAL USAGE STATISTICS. I’m willing to take the time to upload the files and create the links,  but only if people actually listen to them.”  “Fair enough,” was his reponse.

Then I told him this story:

Fresh out of seminary and serving as the Assoc Pastor in a NY church, I was in charge of making sure the services got recorded to cassettes and distributed to the old folks. One Sunday afternoon while delivering communion in a nursing home, I saw a STACK of service/sermon cassetttes on a bedside table.

“Quite a collection!” I said. “Do you enjoy them?” 

“NO” came the reply, “I don’t ever listen to them, too much fuss.” 

 ”Oh, well would you like me to have the Deacon stop bringing them?” 

“No” replied the senior, “maybe I’ll start listening to them.”  

Somehow I doubt she ever did.  She was being honest and polite. I asked several other older members if they listened to the cassettes, and was met with a variety of excuses.  “My hands hurt too much to press the buttons.”  “I’m all thumbs.”  “I don’t hear so well. “   But.. I decided that giving the Deacon a REASON to make that visit …having a cassette in hand, was reason enough to continue the tape ministry.

But posting them on a church website is DIFFERENT than the old cassette ministry.  These were likely going to be sermons for “the rest of the congregation” to hear, if they wanted to hear them. Our church has a fair number of snowbirds, so maybe the stats will go up during the off season as the snowbirds try to stay in touch. And maybe if someone was sick, or enjoyed the sermon and wanted to hear it a second time. Or maybe they wanted to hear a certain quote or reference. Putting sermons on the church website seems to me to be QUITE different than that old cassette ministry. So I’m intrigued to see if we get many “hits” on those files.

But I’m still going in cautiously. Some ideas, EVEN GOOD IDEAS, are often not worth the extra effort. They can be “make work.”  Or, “feel good” efforts that have little impact or importance.  And here I’m speaking to the church web techies:  they can ask you to do lots of little things like this, …and after a while you’re doing so many that it has turned into quite the project. So even with “good ideas” you need to TEST FOR RESULTS.

And that’s one of the cool things about websites, you CAN ACTUALLY MEASURE whether all the effort is worth it.  Even a modest website has controls you can set that can generate statistics of how many time the sermon audio files have been accessed. We’re using Wordpress for our church website, and the stats are right on the “Dashboard” …the control panel.  We’ll use those stats to determine IF and HOW MANY sermons should be posted in the future.

But…there’s one BIG problem with Web Stats:
Typical web stats will only show us how many times the audio file was “clicked for download.” They can’t tell us if the sermon was entirely listened to.

The Dec 20 2009 sermon had 24 “clicks” over a three week period. Our congregation has about 140 people in it. Some of those clicks may be searchbots, or searchers looking for “Advent Sermons” as their keyword. But the remainder, let’s say 12, is not an insignificant number.

 So here’s what I’m going to do…. 
I’m going to EDIT IN a special message half way through one of the next sermons I post. It will say, “We’re trying to figure out if anyone actually LISTENS to these sermons, If you hear this message, call my cell phone now, and I will give you a free gift.”   (It will be a copy of a favorite religious book).

On this page at a later date I’ll let you know how that works out !

First: Paypal. You simply sign up, fill out a form and they generate some code which you can paste into your website code. Paypal has several competitors, such as Google Checkout. Most are very similar. If you’re a non-profit, they take a certain percentage of every transaction (typically 2.5%), plus a per transaction fee (typically 30 cents a transaction). This is pretty standard for all creditcard transactions. To learn more go to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donate-intro-outside

There are many other web companies willing to set you up with a “Donate Now” button, but while their transaction fees are competitive, they often ALSO charge you a one-time set-up fee of anywhere from $50 to $250. Paypal doesn’t charge a set up fee for non-profits.

I made this button for the soup kitchen website I help maintain.

 The second option I want to recommend is www.NetworkforGood.org. This non-profit company offers two ways to let people donate to your cause: 1) Immediately through their webform, or 2) Through a custom form you can get from them (for a setup fee). The first time YOU go to their website, you need to perform a SEARCH for your organization. Look for the “Support Any Charity” option on their Home page.

There are similar non-profits on the web. Wouldn’t it be great if your DENOMINATION created an organization to manage this process to save costs and support things like missions?

To create a direct link to your donate now page at their website, you’ll need to register for their free option . They’ll need your organization’s EIN tax number and will send you a password. When you get the password, go back to their site and complete the registration. Their instructions will give you a link address to which you add your EIN number to the end of the address. That’s your donate now link you can post on any website or send in an email.  When somebody clicks that link, they are taken directly to your non-profit’s info at the NetworkForGood website, and a creditcard form that can be filled out on the spot.

When people click that link, they are taken to Networkforgood’s website where they see your organization’s name and mailing address data, and a Credit Card Donation form on the screen for them to fill out.  Very easy. [You could sign up and pay for a "custom" donate now page, but it's not cheap and has a monthly fee as well. The 'free' option works fine.]  When you donate through their form, Networkforgood sends a check to the organization you want to support. They know the mailing address, because every 501-3c’s  mailing address is a matter of public record.

Sounds simple, and it is, but the first time I saw this, I had to test it, so I sent $5 to an organization. And sure enough, about a week later they got a check in the mail from Networkforgood with my name on it as the donor. You also have to pay attention to their options for “organization” sign up.

TRY IT OUT !   Go to www.networkforgood.org and look down the right side of their Home page for the “SUPPORT ANY CHARITY” search box. Start there and search for your organization. When you find it, click it’s name and note the page URL that opens up. That’s what you can send others to -to make their donation.

Of course, Networkforgood.org collected 2.5% of my donation plus transaction fee. But any CC processing will do the same. So for example, if you make a $100 donation, Networkforgood sends $97.20.  UPDATE:  the rate is now 4.5% if you do not sign up as a “customer” and pay their registration fee and montly maintenance fee.  See my “COMMENT” below for details about this, and why CC processing charges are going up.

Why your organization should accept Credit Card donations…

My instinct is to say, “Do I REALLY need to explain this here in the 21st Century?”  But yeah, we probably still need to explain it to some people.  Here’ s my explanation:  Credit and Debit cards are a fact of life. Many of us CHOOSE to manage our spending with these tools. We pay our bills online because it’s convenient and manageable. And the immediacy of paying through a “Donate Now” button allows us to follow through on our desire to be good stewards.  Trying to remember to send a check later in the month is not good stewardship.

There is no shame in giving people an option to respond to real needs. And some organizations have a real need to handle contributions VIRTUALLY.   For example, three of the four non-profit websites I work with belong to organizations that have FAR FLUNG groups of supporters. Our “members” don’t congregate on Sundays to put money in a basket.  

My church, for example, doubles in size every Winter with snowbirds. Our website is one way for them to keep in touch during the off season, and the Donate Now button allows them to support various fundraisers that pop up during the year when they are not physically present.   Most of them WANT TO SUPPORT these efforts. And giving them a convenient “Donate Now” option helps them feel connected across the distance.

Rather than be embarrassed by creditcard donations, -or thinking that they somehow cheapen the giving of gifts (as some old-fashioned folks will say), donating via creditcard is as an opportunity for people to RESPOND to NEEDS in a way that’s IMMEDIATE, and in a manner that’s CONVENIENT to them.  When someone comes to our soup kitchen website, we are ALREADY implicitly asking for their support. And God knows we need it… in any amount, as soon as they can donate it.

And before anyone decries the “cost of creditcard transactions,” consider the other costs:

• The cost of an envelope, a check and a postage stamp.
• The time and cost of accounting for checks
• And cost of losing potential donations because well-intentioned givers DO forget!

It has been said that churches should not be encouraging the use of creditcards, especially these days when so many people have abused their credit. My response to that is that we should not be encouraging the abuse of cash and bank accounts either. Stewardship is more than asking for money, among other things, it’s about helping people manage their finances so that they CAN contribute. That said,  I would suggest that we ask members to ONLY use their DEBIT cards, so that they are not financing their contributions.

If you discover OTHER ONLINE OPTIONS that are easy to implement and not very expensive, please leave your comments here below.

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Exciting Bible Software for Exciting Sunday School Kids
http://www.sundaysoftware.com

Would you like for users of your church library to get automatic emails about new resources?

Would you like to do that FREE and EASY?

…then read this article:

Church volunteers and librarians frequently email me asking “how to put their church library resources online to members can see what we have!”  And over the years I’ve pointed them to library software which can be put on your church’s server or just run on a computer sitting in the library.  Most cost money. Some are easier to use than others.   And if you want to make your  “library software” accessible online, it can quickly get complicated.

Library software has an achilles heel too:  ONE PERSON ends up managing the software -trying to keep it all up to date. And they have to do it where the software is installed, which usually means sitting in the library at the computer.  Eventually, both that volunteer and the software go out of date.

Fortunately, time has marched on!  And there’s now a FREE solution that’s REALLY EASY to implement, allows for searchability and multiple contributors, and has all the functionality that most church library will want.

Drumroll please!

Go create a free online library using free and easy to use “blog” software  at wordpress.com.  

You can do it from any computer, and start by posting your individual resources as “posts” under the “categories” you create through wordpress.com’s easy to use online blog software.

Look at my example at www.churchlibrary.wordpress.com  Took me about 25 minutes to make from home.

WHAT ???   ”Blog” Software? 
Yep, it’s easy! …it’s free, …and it will do everything the typical church library needs to do, –and some new things you always wish your church library could do! 

Come see my sample “Church Library Blog” at www.churchlibrary.wordpress.com

The Advantages of creating a Church Library “Blog” in Wordpress….

1. It’s free.

If I want to convert it to it’s own domain name, such as 1stChurchLibrary.org, I can pay a small fee to wordpress to do that.

2. You select from Templates to create your blog. No graphics or web-coding knowledge necessary. In fact, you can change templates with the simple click of a button.  (I can’t stress enough how SHORT the learning curve is for creating a ‘blog’ at wordpress.com.)

Link to our great software resources

3. Wordpress blog software can be accessed from any computer via the web. You do not install it on your computer. It’s on their servers and they update the software regularly for free. (and if you want a custom web address, it will cost you about $15 a year from wordpress)

4. You can easily set up many “contributors” who can help you build the site and edit it from their own computers. This keeps the site from dieing.

5. Wordpress blog features easy-to-add SEARCH FUNCTIONS, and tons of other widgets you can add simply by dragging the feature onto your template.

6. People can “subscribe” to receive email about new resources. You can set up a Feedburner Email Newsletter service right in the blog so that any “subscribing” to your Library Blog will instantly get notifications of your new postings. See my church website article which describes how to set up a free Google “Feedburner” email newsletter for any website.

See my article about Creating a Church Website in Wordpress which includes instructions on how to setup a free Google “Feedburner” Email Newsletter, – at http://www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm

7. With a little creative thinking and use, your blog can also track “who has checked out the resource” by using the blog’s comment features. See my examle at www.churchlibrary.wordpress.com

Privacy Note: Anybody can leave a ‘comment’ on any resource post you create. As the moderator of the site, you’ll get email notifications anytime someone leaves a comment. Then you must go in to ‘approve it’ to make it visible to other. Or …you can just read them and respond privately.

8. Did I mention that Wordpress blog software is intuitive and easy to use? 

9. When someone posts a “comment” to one of your resource posts in the blog, the blog software AUTOMATICALLY notifies you via email about the person’s comment. It acts as a message system.

————-

In my example Church Library Blog, you can see that I can create many many different CATEGORIES of resources, and then create individuals posts for each resource under the appropriate category.

Now I know that many church resources are coded BY NUMBER, maybe even properly coded!  The numbering system doesn’t have to go away. It can still be used to organize the materials on the shelf. And you can still INCLUDE the number in your online description. But ‘online search’ isn’t about numbers for the average user, –it’s about keywords (authors, titles and subject).   And the built-in search feature you can enable in Wordpress, will allow any user to search your entire site just by typing keywords into a search field. You don’t have to enter or organize keywords. The built-in search function looks at ALL the text you put in every post.

Why Wordpress and not Google’s Blogger ?? (aka Blogspot –which is another online free popular blog service).   Wordpress allows you to organize posts under ”categories” (subjects), whereas, Blogger/blogspot.com organizes posts by the date they were posted.  Wordpress is the solution.

Last but not least…
Suppose you “just want to have a computer in the church library with software that helps you organize the library.“   That’s cool, but you can still use wordpress.com as your “library software.”  The difference is that your “library software” isn’t stored on your computer, it’s stored online at wordpress.com. And that makes it accessible and maintainable from ANY computer –whether it’s sitting in the church library …or at home.  The fact that church members can now access your extensive cataloging work from THEIR home computers is merely a huge bonus.  

What to do next:

1. Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a free blog. Title is something like yourchurchlibrary.wordpress.com.  

2. Pick a nice simple starter template. Play around with the “appearance” and “widget” features.

3. Dive into the “dashboard and start creating some sample categories and posts.

Within a short time, you’ll be a wizard. And you can sit down with other volunteers to lay out how you’re going to organize things.

And don’t worry, nothing is carved in stone!  You can reorganize categories, pages and resource postings with a click of your mouse. It’s really quite Easy.

Neil MacQueen
www.sundayresources.net/neil
www.sundaysoftware.comPermission granted to copy for local church use.

Case in point:

I’ve been helping a local school rebuild their website. The school is connected to our church. Last year, “the boyfriend” of a board member registered the school’s domain name as a favor to them and signed them up for a web hosting account and posted some simple files.  That was “mistake #1.”  They needed somebody better connected to the school who knew what they were doing. Long term, as you will see, if can make a difference.

Mistake #2 was he registered it with a Start Logic -which wasn’t actually a domain registrar like Network Solutions. When he stopped working on the site (almost as soon as he started) we tried to MOVE the site to a better host with more features, and Start Logic became uncooperative.  The boyfriend was trying to do the school a favor by saving them few bucks and they got exactly what he paid for.

Mistake #3, the boyfriend lost the log-in information for the domain account. He DID have the log-in info to upload files to the webhost, but not to manage or transfer the domain. And for some reason, they seemed incapable or unwilling to release that info even to him. And he had never really done this before so he didn’t really know how to fix it by himself. All this could have been averted if he had copied the school on all this important information. But he didn’t. So we couldn’t get into the domain account to transfer it to a new techie.

I’d like to say that this never happens to churches and THEIR techies, but it does. And if YOU ARE that Tech, I’m sure you’re thinking “this won’t happen to me,  but it could. In the situation of the school, they needed a better plan of implementation, a better qualified person to help them get started, and more responsible decisions regarding important information. 

Mistake #4…. Lack of Communication. In the case of the school I was helping, “the boyfriend” registered the school’s domain with one spelling, and then 2 days later, the Director of the school registered it using a different spelling. Both were fine, but there was an obvious lack of coordination and duplication of expense. The site itself began to reflect this lack of communication, and within 2 or 3 months, the project was dead in the water.

Here are my tips to help you avoid problems….

1. Don’t let an amateur or someone you don’t know set up your domain name account or webhosting. This is how First Lutheran in Iowa City gets the domain name 1stLuth-Iowa.com instead of FirstLutheran.org, registered with Bob’s Discount Web Hosting that went out of business last month. This is how a “voluntechie” sets up your church website on a host server that’s slow and without features. This is how you discover a year later that the voluntechie lost the account info.

2. Register your domain through a bonafide domain registrar, such as Network Solutions, who’s customer service is excellent and can be reached BY PHONE.

Some web hosts will register your domain for you…but be careful. Make sure YOU can access the domain service account, and not just them. And some of these web hosts are difficult to deal with and have little or no phone support. They only want email, but won’t talk to you if your email address is not the same one as originally listed on the registered account. Use a good company that has live phone support to register the domain name (your church’s URL, ie, web address). Use Network Solutions.

Then when you register the domain, COPY all the registration info and log-in info to your pastor or another church leader. Create a paper trail.

4. Make sure the church’s contact info is part of the domain and host registrations. Always always always use the name of the church, the address of the church and the PHONE number of the church IN the domain registration. And do the same with the webhosting account.

Insist on this. That way, if you ever need to wrest control of the domain from a disgruntled volunteer, long-gone volunteer, or bad host, you can call up the registrar (Network Solutions who I recommend) and they will give you control over the domain if you have all this information with which to verify you with.  Do not let your techie register it to themselves.

5. Discuss your domain name needs before letting someone register it. Occasionally a church staffer complains to me about their church’s website address. They say things like “the pastor let the techie come up with the domain name and it’s too long.”  Or they complain that somehow the church got a “.com” when 99% of all churches use “.org”  Discuss your domain name options with others, and then come up with one or two good alternates, just in case the one you want is taken.

Neil’s Suggested Rules for coming up with a good domain name:

1. Easy to spell
2. Easy to remember
3. Easy to say
4. Easy to understand when heard
5. Rolls off the tongue
6. No hyphens, extra ‘dots’ or underscores
7. Relatively short
8. Reasonably descriptive of what the site is
9. .org, not .com (A surprising number of church list themselves as commercial sites)
10. Will wear well over the years.

For more church website ideas, read more posts in this topic here in my sundayresources.net/neil blog.
You can also find great info at http://www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm

an article by Neil MacQueen, Sunday Software
Below is the ABBREVIATED VERSION of the article originally posted at www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm

This article will be updated at www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm

Why suggest Wordpress as a way to create a church website? There are a lot very good reasons…

First, I’m a realist. I’ve created several websites and two blogs. I’ve worked in the church as a pastor and volunteer, and I’ve worked on several church websites. This article reflects real lessons learned. Wordpress is a great answer to problems that afflict many church websites.

Second, you not only need to create a church website, you need to MAINTAIN one too. And there’s the rub. Most church websites are poorly maintained. Many start out looking great -and end up stale or abandoned. The person who did all the initial heavy lifting -leaves, or staffers change or lose interest. Or there’s no easy way for multiple people to contribute content. The ‘design’ person ends up having to post everything, and that gets frustrating -usually for the design person! They get tired of people NOT giving them fresh content.

Or they have a volunteer who is good at designing websites, but not that interested in collecting fresh content. Some churches resort to hiring out to get a nice “first” website, but soon learn that the design company must be continually fed money in order to keep the site fresh.

Building a site in Wordpress ADDRESSES many of these real world issues. Wordpress can be set up and maintained by ANY volunteer who has a modest amount of web skills.

It has a lot of automated processes, such as updating your menus each time you post something. And it allows for multiple contributors.

Wordpress’ online tool can be easily learned by new volunteers. Wordpress continues to develop and improve their tools. A Wordpress account is incredibly easy to set up.

And Wordpress is ridiculously inexpensive.

Wordpress tools are all online. You sign up for a site, go to your site, sign in, and access the site’s dashboard control panel to post new announcements, photos, and make design changes. This means you you can manage your site from ANY computer in the world as long as you have the password to your account. No software to download or install. Slick.

You can count on some Web Techies turning up their noses at this Wordpress/online solution. They’d naturally prefer to create a custom website of their own design using their own software. Many web developers I’ve met love the idea of creating a church site from scratch. They want to contribute to the church and show what they can do. And some actually do a great job long-term. But over time, most get discouraged and/or move on.

Commercial Break:  Kids Love Computers!  That’s why I started Sunday Software, to attract kids to computers running Bible software. Learn more at www.sundaysoftware.com

 

Here’s what I suggest you do next:

3. When you’re ready to go public with your site, click the UPDATE feature on your site’s “dashboard” –to move your prototype to it’s own full domain name so that members and visitors will visit yourwebsite.org instead of yourwebsite.wordpress.com.

It costs about $15 a year to do this, which is incredibly reasonable when you consider that this includes the annual HOSTING FEE as well as the annual Domain Name fee, plus all the tools to build your site.

__________________________________________________

Here’s the most powerful feature of any church website: email subscriptions

(see these instructions in the full article over at www.sundaysoftware.com/wordpress.htm)

Sacrifices: Your site’s appearance is limited to the Wordpress templates, and there are currently about 50 to choose from, of which I personally like about 6 for church use. They are customizable to a point, and if you know Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) you can make quite a lot of changes. Creative web people might feel like Wordpress restricts their creativity… but considering the REAL WORLD experience many churches have suffered through regarding their sites, it’s not a bad thing to emphasize functionality and content over endless options, ease of use over complexity, collaboration over having to do it all yourself, and longevity over staleness.

You can install Wordpress to your own web hosting account and some webhosts are very Wordpress friendly, so investigate your host first. This will also allow you to add more complexity to your Wordpress created site. But complexity can begin to create some of the problems that many church websites eventually suffer from, so be careful about over doing it. For the average church wishing to have a modest but good looking and functional website, starting out with a site hosted at Wordpress.com is the way to go.

There is a learning curve. You need to spend time with Wordpress to
figure out all its options.

But once you’ve got them figured out
-you’re set, and can easily teach others how to help build and post
content with you, …even your pastor

Copyright 2009. Neil MacQueen, www.sundaysoftware.com All rights reserved.

Neil MacQueen is a techie-minister writing about tech and ‘other’ subjects for the Church.

Why it’s time:

1. Effort
Sending an old-fashioned bulk mail newsletter requires that someone spend hours collecting information, typing, editing and formatting it. Then it must be duplicated, folded, labeled, and SORTED for bulk postage purposes, -and taken to the post office. Whether you’re a large or small church, have volunteers or paid staff doing it, it’s a lot of effort. And in many churches, it means that timely information isn’t getting out on time, or as often as the church would like. Whereas an email newsletter only requires some basic formatting, then you press SEND.

2. Waste
Most printed newsletters end up in the trash. Most people don’t read them thoroughly, or they forget what’s in them too quickly and throw them out. Yes, they may read your email news with about the same care! …but you’re spending less, getting it to them in a timely way, and you can send follow-up reminders at no charge.

3. Timeliness
Email newsletters are received in a matter of minutes. Old-fashioned newsletters can take a week or more to create, and days to arrive in member homes. Bulk Mail is at the mercy of the postal system. And if your members are spread out across zipcodes it can take over a week in some cases for someone outside your church’s area to receive your newsletter.

4. Limitations
Printed newsletters get sent once a month due to the effort, time and cost of sending them. Email newsletters can be sent as often as you need. Most email news services allow unlimited number of “sends” during each month’s subscription to their service. In most cases, the email newsletter rate is based on the size of your list, not the frequency.

5. The Cost
Email newsletter services, such as www.iContact.com or www.ConstantContact.com, charge by the size of your email address list. IF you have up to 500 email addresses on your list, it can cost as little as $10 per month total. I use www.emailbrain.com for my company. It has a slightly lower rate, but I pay for X number of sends per month. You can easily change to a different service should you need to. Many email newsletter services offer a 10 to 20% discount for non-profit organizations. Contrast that to the bulk postage rate you’re paying now of $40 per 200 pieces of mail a month, -not including copying costs or staff time. 

A few years ago, one forward thinking church thought they’d get resistance to switching from a postal newsletter to email, so they did this bit of sales job:  At the top of every email newsletter they printed this notice:  “This month’s email newsletter savings was donated to ________ mission project. To date, our switch to an email newsletter has allowed us to give $X more for mission. Please forward a copy of this newsletter to your friends and family.”  –Nobody complained.

After I first published this post, a pastor in a 300 member church told me this story. He ran a half page “ad” in their printed newsletter for two months which read, “We are thinking of switching to an email newsletter instead of a print newsletter. If you think this is a bad idea and would still like to receive a printed newsletter , call us now at….” He got two phonecalls in 2 months, one from someone who thought it was a great idea. When they switched, several people complained, but none of those people could remember seeing the “ad” in the newsletter. Several months later a member of the church passed away, and the pastor sent out funeral details in an email newsletter. He said it was one of the best attended funerals in recent memory, and there were non-members who attended because someone had forwarded the pastor’s email to them.

6. The Old Folks are Online
According to 2009 Pew Internet Research, 74% of people age 64 and older have an email address.  Those who don’t have email addresses might appreciate your help to get them get one. Those who don’t have one or don’t want one can be sent a copy of the email newsletter in the mail.

7. Email Newsletters give you feedback
Most of the popular email newsletter services offer you tools to TRACK who’s reading their email newsletters, what links they’re clicking on in the newsletter (such as that link back to your church website mission page). No more GUESSING if they’re reading it. It’s sophisticated, and it’s included in your email subscription service.

8. Email Newsletters can drive people to your website
Church websites can be a wealth of information & community building, –if only you had an easy way to get people to go there. A LINK in your email news can do that.

Try these:

Vertical Response email marketers offers free email newsletter services to non-profits up to 10,000 emails a month. And they have a great training website that walks you through everything. www.verticalresponse.com/non-profits/ 

You can also look at www.emailbrain.com, www.iContact.com, or www.ConstantContact.com for features, pricing and details. Each is a reputable company offering a discount to non-profits and a free trial so you can experiment with their tools and email to a select group.

http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/    A blog with some funny stuff, insight, and technical helps.

www.churchmarketingsucks.com/archives/web_sites/ This site is awesome, and it has edgy truth about Church websites too.

www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm  “Building a Better Church Website”  …my main article on the subject. Read it.

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/tw_tips.php  70 Tips for Church Websites.

Click here to Subscribe to free email notifications every time I update this blog.

Helping members share church website information with each other and their friends is not only a nice thing to do, it’s a form of evangelism. So, say you’re putting up a page about the children’s group, or upcoming church concert or picnic.  Add this code snippet to the page so that your members can visit the page and EASILY email their friends a link back to the page to invite them to attend.  

The following javascript code snippet can easily be copied into any of your web pages. It will create a button that says “Email a Link to this Page to a Friend.” When the button is clicked, it will open up the user’s default email program and place the link in the body of the email. All they need to do is supply the email address and send it.

Here’s the code:

<script language=”javascript”>function NavTo(url){ window.location = url }</script>

<INPUT class=”NavButton” onclick=”NavTo(’mailto:&subject=Take a look at this webpage&body=’+ ‘ ‘ + location.href)” type=”button” value=”Email a Link to this Page to a Friend”>

How-to:

Copy the code into the html source code of your web page. You can place it anywhere on the page between the <body> tags of your html.

Change the wording of the subject to personalize the subject line that will appear in the email. The snippet above is worded, “Take a look at this webpage” You can change it to anything you want. Do not delete the ‘=’ or ‘&’ signs before and after the text.

Change the wording of the “value” statement in the code to personalize the button. In the snippet above, the button reads, “Email a Link to this Page to a Friend.” Change only the text. Do not delete the quotation marks.

Save, upload and test your page.

Include this link on pages which your members might likely share with family and friends. These might include:

• Photo pages at your church site
• Worship times
• Maps to the church
• Information about special occasions
• The Pastor’s Blog
• Sermons online

You might be surprised by what I consider to be a “GOOD” church website. It’s not one with all the bells and whistles. I’ve been creating websites for about ten years, including building my former church’s website. And what I’ve learned is that fancy does not necessarily equal good.

What makes a church website “good” ?

GOOD = Fresh, inviting, and helpful.
GOOD = one that church members use  …and visitors actually visit.
GOOD = a church website that allows members to talk with each other.
GOOD = one that’s easy for volunteers to maintain.

Bad = Fancy but out of date content.
Bad = Amateurish mistakes, such as, ALL CAPS, mis-aligned text and graphics, cruddy photos.
Bad = Professionally created but lifeless.
Bad = So time consuming the project eventually grinds to a halt.
Bad = Nobody goes there.
Bad = “Your Bad Here“ 

 

 

A good Church website:
    (1) communicates effectively with heart & soul, and stays fresh
    (2) builds community within the congregation
    (3) reaches out beyond the congregation
    (4) doesn’t crush the person(s) who maintains it.

Most church websites are seriously lacking in photos. Yet in my experience, they are the most appreciated and viewed feature on the church website. Members love them. They help tell your story. They serve as a visual record of past events. They remind people of what’s great about your congregation. And they give people a reason to come back to your site –to see themselves.

My best advice to you is this: Build your photo pages with the future in mind.

When I first started out, I posted the pics as regular ol’ jpegs on simple html pages. I didn’t use thumbnails. Instead, I just cropped & dropped photos down to about 35k each, 400 x 300 pixels each, – so I could fit 5 or 6 per page without an overly long download time per page for the average visitor. That worked for about the first year or two.  But over time, the collection grew and became unwieldy.  And with some events, I wanted to post larger photos and more of them.

Within a year the collection had grown to the point where I needed a photo album utility program to manage my photos, generate thumbnails, and display them in some automatically created templates that looked nice. I also wanted something that looked a little more ‘professional.’

Not wanting to buy software, I experimented with the free stuff and was not disappointed. I downloaded some trial copies, and found that JALBUM was head & shoulders above the rest. www.jalbum.net 

JAlbum has a lots of display options, easy to use templates, advanced features for the geek, and automated batch processing of multiple photos. You just drop your pics into folders and let it generate the pages per your settings, then you upload the output to your site. JAlbum can even do that for you. It updates already uploaded album content each time you add more photos.

I won’t kid you, you do have to learn it, but it’s pretty easy if you already understand how to upload pages. I never read the manual. Screwed it up once or twice, then started to cruise. One of the things I like about JAlbum is that they are up to version 7 as of the date of this post. That shows a long-term commitment to improving and supporting their product. Very cool for a free program.  Some other ‘free’ album program out there are version 1 and buggy.

One downside to ANY photo album software or service is that “the next person” who comes after you may not be comfortable with your software, or like your approach to organizing the photos. And over 5 or 6 years you could AMASS quite a lot of photos. Not much you can do about that, except to remember to SAVE THE ORIGINALS so that whoever comes after you has original content to work with. Yet this is another reason I like JAlbum… the next person who comes after you will be able to get it for free and -if past is an indicator of future –will likely be working with an updated version.  That’s important because they’ll be able to MODIFY what you did, instead of having to start over from scratch with some other software.

Churches aren’t very good about maintaining ‘historical records’ such as photos, which is a shame. So think of your website as a repository for such archives, AND provide the church office with a CD of all your photo originals from time to time. Do them a favor and PRINT FAVORITE PHOTOS on high quality photo printers your BEST photos. In my experience, some burned CD-Rs can “go bad” after about 6 years. Discomforting I know, but word to the wise.

ALTERNATIVES:

Numerous photo websites offer free storage for your photos. Kodak, Picassa, Photobucket -to name a few. Here are the downsides to some “web based” approaches:

1. You upload your content to THEIR site, not yours. Your photo pages would not have your church’s navigational links.
2. You may be limited in your layout options.
3. You may have limited on storage space which doesn’t seem too little now, but may in a year or two.
4. If you choose an off-the-beaten-track photo gallery site, they could go out of business taking your photos with them.
5. Some of these sites will put ads with your photos.

If I had to pick one ‘web-based’ service, I’d go with Picasa. It’s from Google. They give you the free photo organizing software (with some photo editing tools), and give you 1 Gigabyte of free photo space. You can pay for more storage space. Your church’s webpage would simply have a LINK to your picasa website page. 

JAlbum is also free, uploads pics to YOUR site, has many more display options, and keeps all your photos under your own navigational menus.  www.jalbum.net

<>< Neil

At my former church, I spent a couple of years as a volunteer building and making improvements to their website. (I was also involved in the CE program there too). At the request of the pastor, I took it over from a volunteer who I had actually seen sitting in front of the church’s computer with an HTML MANUAL to create the church site. Needless to say, it was NOT good.

In its place, I put something better. Not fancy, just respectable and loaded with great photos and regularly refresh content. Then after doing the site myself for about three years, we gathered a committee and spent about 10 months working as a team. We had a lot of great discussion and ideas, and implemented some great changes and features. I really enjoyed the people on that team. The site was still rather modestly designed, but it kept getting better. Even had a message board where committees could post their notes to each other.  

Then I decided to move on from that church. And about 4 months later I visited the site and saw that someone there had basically nuked the site. And its place they put a circa 1996 style website.

You can see a screenshot of the “new” site here at the right>

It has looked bad for the last 7 months, and what’s weird is they didn’t need to nuke what was up there. It was all in HTML and easily editable. They took it all down and put up new pages, all of which look pretty much as bad as this page on the right looks.  The only nice thing is the graphic, which was part of the old site. Lately they have added some text to the main page, but it’s formatted wrong and looks odd on the page, as does pretty much everything else, –which is the tip-off that whoever is doing it, doesn’t quite know how. They’re still promising to post pdfs of the newsletter going on 7 months now. All of this which is to say “Imagine what this says to visitors? …let alone the members.”

They really should not have nuked the previous site until they had a new site ready. But I digress…

The first lesson I learned is “you can’t control what you can’t control.” Work as you may on the church site, but eventually someone else will take it over, whether you retire, move on, or hand it over.  I’m left shaking my head, and probably so are a couple of members still there. In retrospect, I should have identified volunteers web talent to work on the site with me, –and not just good people with good ideas. That’s the thing about website development… the team needs to include people who actually know how to put something up that’s respectable.  

The second lesson is I should have believed what people had been telling me from other churches and not assumed it wouldn’t happen to me. For years I’ve been hearing church website horror stories from other pastors and church web techies. – Web work that gets nuked or disfigured by some volunteer, and the staff or other leaders don’t know what to do about it, don’t know if the original files still exist, or just hope it will get better, (or don’t care). Or sites that get built in complex code by some company or super-webtechie, and the next volunteer doesn’t know how to work with it, so they must nuke it.

I should have forseen this, but by the time we decided to leave that congregation, it was too late to do what I should have done a year before. Again… I should have worked harder with the staff and volunteers at my former church to understand the “basics” of good church website design. I should have helped them identify WHO in the congregation knew a thing or two about creating a good site. 

The Third Lesson I’ve learned is that many churches have ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER regarding their website. Staff and committees will SAY they want something, and will encourage you to work on the site because YOU want to, and they may even sing your praises, –but after a while they will lose interest. Then if YOU lose interest, it may very well fall apart. (I’m talking about all sorts of projects and great ideas, not just websites here.) It’s one of the reasons I recommend building MODEST sites.  I’ve heard this same thing from other church techies that I’ve come up with the following guidelines which I wish I would have heeded myself!

Guidelines:

1:  Know Thyself. If you are your church’s web techie, then the site will likely be only as good as YOU want to make it, with maybe some help from a few others. After the initial groundswell of support and praise, don’t expect a continuing stream of new info and photos. Plan on getting those yourself. If you are the volunteer who said you’d build it, but don’t have the commitment or time to continue to update it …stop now and reconsider what you’re going to build them.

2:  Work in Moderation.  Just because you CAN do cool stuff doesn’t mean people will embrace it with anything more than “that’s cool.”  We set up some cool stuff on my former church’s site, and got the initial “wow, neat” comments… then nothing. Advice: Just because you HAVE lots of time to build whatever, don’t over do it if it’s not that important to them. PACE yourself so that you can provide the site for the LONG HAUL.

3:  Recognize what year this is. We are still YEARS away from seeing the average church embrace the idea of connecting with each other via the web and using the church site to help the ministry of the church (instead of just advertise it).  Get in for the long haul and even though you can BUILD Rome in a day, don’t expect the Romans to want to live there quite yet. 

I hope some of my story and insights will help your own.

<>< Neil 

Read my article on How to build a better church website:  http://www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm