Use Google's new Accessible Search

Google Accessible Search searches for pages that are easy to read for the visually handicapped. That is, if your web page is easy for a screen reader to handle, it scores higher in the results.

This is one way to test out accessibility of your web pages for visually impaired people. Test it by doing some searches that you'd hope got your web page in the first page of the rankings. If the rankings are not what you'd like, get to work on SEO (search engine oiptimization) and accessibility.

Site planning saves time

Many church webs sites would benefit greatly from better planning. While in the military, I heard an old maxim ... "One minute of planning saves 12 minutes of execution". In other words, a good plan prevents wasted time later. This certainly pertains to web sites.

When thinking about creating or changing a web site, a good place to start is Gospelcom's " Your first two questions" page. The page even has a Planning Worksheet.

Put in your plan:

• Clear writing (it doesn't come easy)
• Good accessibility (by people with varied disabilities)
• Great usability (for example, make text easy to scan and ensure the site is easy to navigate).

"Who-What-Where-When-Why" is a standard journalism standard for writing a straight news story. Let's apply that standard to web site planning:

• Who do you want to reach with your web site?
  Who will do the needed web page editing and site management?
  Who will provide content?
  Who will approve content prior to publishing it?
• What results do you hope to get from your web site?
  What type of site will it be -- simple online brochure, internal, outreach, ... ?
• Where will you host the site? Costs, services, and support vary widely.
• When does you church want this done? Be realistic about the time involved, both for thesite startup and for updating of content.
• Why have a web? If church members can't answer this with enthusiasm, forget it.

Some related links:

• Planning your web site design (Macromedia -- now Adobe)
• Planning (Web Style Guide)
• Web site planning (TechSoup)
• Site Planning Basics - what you should know before you design a web site

Design pages for speed!

Surfers just hate to wait. As computers get faster and more people have broadband, they expect pages to display in as few as 8 seconds.

Extracts of the book "Speed up your Web site" at WebSite Optimization has good pointers. The author says that people now get frustrated if a web page doesn't load in the first 8 - 10 seconds. The old dial-up days guideline was 30 seconds. That's a huge difference.

Some tips to reduce page display times:

• Use only essential images. Excessive use of images gives a cluttered look anyway.
• Optimize images. Optimizing images can drastically reduce file size (and thuis display time). Some free optimizers are online (some offer free "lite" type versions online) or use your favorite graphics editor (I use Paint Shop Pro -- it costs lots less than PhotoShop).
• "Chunk" information. Use subheads and bullets instead of long narrative text. This can also help search engine optimization (SEO).
• Reduce excess verbiage. I call this "verbal essence".
• Avoid very long pages. Try to reduce text by 50%. Then split up long pages and link to them.

Are youth shunning email?

"Email is the new snail mail..." for today's youth says an article in USA Today. What's causing that?

• Spam is junking up email inboxes. A 2003 Pew study, "Spam: How it is hurting email and degrading life on the Internet " stated that about half of all email was spam. Spam has mushroomed from then. People feel that it's out of control and they don't want to have to deal with it.
• Cell phones let youth communicate faster than typing email messages.
• Instant Messaging (IM) is gaining popularity with the young crowd, which favors immediate gratification in communication.
• Text messaging from cell phones and hand held devices fills a desire for immediate, "anywhere" communication.

Does quick communication have a down-side?

A problem with the faster ways of communicating is the chance of bad assumptions. The list below is in order of increased possible misunderstanding of the message:

• Face-to-face talking, which has the least chance of being misunderstood due to observation of voice tone plus body language.
• Phone calls
• Email
• Instant Messaging (IM)
• Text messaging (or should I say "TXT MSGNG"?) is fast and convenient but conveys the least amount of total information about the message.

Do we even need email anymore?

This is not the death nell for email. Even youth do see a continuing need for email:

• When the message needs to go to many people, not just one.
• For more formal correspondence. Not that long ago, email was looked at as too informal,; now some view it as more formal than their normal communications.
• When the message needs attachments.
• For better documentation.
• When they have more time and an increased desire to write (in sentences) and perhaps late at night when the other person is not available by IM, phone, or text messaging.
• When communicating with adults and people in authority.

How does this apply to churches?

Your church needs to communicate to youth on their level. In communicating with youth, do your leaders:

• Use cell phones?
• Use IM? (Address privacy concerns, identity theft, and attacks)
• Use web-based chat? (Address privacy concerns, identity theft, and attacks)
• Use text messaging? R U OK W/ TXT MSGS?
• Offer (via your web site) blogs or discussion forums where youth can engage each other and the church leadership via the web? (Make sure you address privacy concerns, protect identities, and protect against attacks.)

Grab ideas from blogs

Keep searching for new ideas, new methods of reaching people through your web site. One way to get ideas is to search for and read some blogs that pertain to webs or religion. Blogs and sites I found when scanning the Gospelcom evangelism area after reading their Web Evangelism Bulletin:

• Effective Web Ministry Notes
• Strategic Digital Outreach - the old story from modern wineskins
• Christian Web Trends blog
• Outside the box ministry
• Emerging Evangelism
• UIE Brain Sparks (UIE = User Interface Engineering)
• IEC ENewsletter (IEC = Internet Evangelism Coalition)
• Church Leader Insights newsletter. Archives are online

Also check out the dozens of email newsletters at Christianity Today.

When we stop learning, we are in danger. As Will Rogers said, "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just stand there." Are your church leaders doing the same old thing or are they proactive and seeking new ways to educate, empower, and equip the saints to carry out God's work?

Color tools for web work

While trying to decide on color changes for the Congo UMC - Mulungwishi blog, I happened across a simple but fast and effective tool — The Colorizer at WebReference.com.

Color Scheme not only helps you check out a palette, but also lets you check out how it looks to people with color vision problems. Cool. Their old version operates a little differently and can be fun too.

And speaking of fun, try the Colour Sampler. Play around with a palette and then select the "Sample Page" link to see all the combinations of text and backgrounds. ColorCombos' ComboTester is a nice, free online utility. The site also has many sample 3 to 5-color palettes.

For PhotoShop fans favoring free goodies, Visibone has downloadable color swatches.

WebReference also has a couple of pages on color, each with good links within the text.

• Communicate with color
• Emotions of colors

Common design errors

Many people have slid into creating web pages without any training in design. A similar pattern emerged after the advent of laser printers and easy-to-use word processors. All of a sudden, many people were producing newsletters and flyers. But the result was often horrible products that experts dubbed "laser crud".

Likewise, many web page editor programs are easy to use now. But that doesn't mean that the results people churn out are automatically great. Below are some common pitfalls to avoid. In the coming weeks, I'll cover several of these in more depth.

• Poor use of white space
• Poor contrast among headlines of differerent importance
• Poor text-to-background contrast
• Grammar and spelling errors
• Too many typefaces (a.k.a. fonts)
• Image display resizing without image file resizing
• Huge images
• Distracting animation
• Too much bold or italic text
• Too many elements on a page
• Too much colored text

Keep main roads running smoothly

Do you know your web site's main roads? These are the destination pages that are most popular. If you don't have a web site statistics report handy, take an educated guess. Think like a visitor. Think like a non-member visitor.

The navigation path ("click path") to these pages should be very clear and easy to find from anywhere in your site. This is a strong usability factor.

Adding a blog header background image

The FreeWebPageHeaders site only offers many free 800x200 pixel images for use as DIV backgrounds. The site also has a tutorial on how to add such background images to a DIV. The technique uses CSS.

Open source web page designs

The folks at Open Source Web Design offer free Web page designs. A spot-check shows that OSWD uses modern CSS coding, not layout tables.

You could use these as the basic for regular or blog-type web pages. So download, tweak, and enjoy.

Another source is the free CSS/HTML templates at Mollio. The six basic designs cover most of the common column types and all use CSS, not layout tables. Mollio offers these under three different licenses: Creative Commons, GPL and CPL.

Translate your web

Do you have congregation members or anyone in your Web site's "target audience" that prefer a language other than English? If so, offer them a way to translate your web page.

Google offers a Language Tools page that "translates" from one language to another. Just type in the web address of the page you want translated, and ... presto. Test it out by translating the Avondale Pattillo UMC home page from English to Spanish.

Outreach tips

The Church Outreach Lab has some interesting comments and useful web page content tips. It also accepts tips and comments from varied churches. Here are a few:

• Keep it very simple. Our brains break complex information into small bits before moving them to long-term memory. So make your communications literally more memorable — simply "keep it simple".
• Most church newsletters are horrendous. For more tips about newsletters , see Avondale Pattillo UMC's special training section. Does your church newsletter look "old school" and out of touch with the modern world?
• Make Sunday worship bulletins seeker-simple. If you truly believe in outreach, make your worship bulletin simple for a seeker to understand. For example, get rid of ancient terms such as Introit, Gloria Patri, Postlude, and the like.
• Hold special events that emphasize your "brand" -- what your church is really all about.
• Communicate by email and the web plus traditional means. Hold some "meetings" or pre-meeting discussions by email. Keep the membership up on late-breaking news by email. Let members receive publications via email. Have a web presence that's more than an online brochure.