91% feel church insensitive

According to research conducted by Barna, 91 percent of non-Christians believe that the church isn't sensitive to their needs. Why? Jargon ("insider terms"), incomplete information, information that doesn't address daily concerns.

Tip: Design and write "for the least" among potential visitors. Avoid "churchy" language.

If your site contains a lot of churchy language, start editing now.

Source: http://www.pastors.com/

Blogs influence traditional web sites

"Increasingly, web users also expect ordinary websites to have blog-like fresh comment and news too."
- Christian Blog Evangelism

A church with a small web site may do well to use a Blog plus a few static pages.  The free Google Blogger now lets you add up to 10 static pages to a blog.

If your church has bought a hosting package that includes RSS feeds , consider adding a teasers to them on the home page to blogs (pastor, youth director, ..)

If you have static web pages for your main site, consider adding home page links to any dynamic content you may have -- such as blogs or photos.

Making websites that are evangelistic

Websites offer us incredible power to share the Good News. But to make use of this potential, we must understand
these six issues:

• The nature of the Internet -- It is a pull medium.
• There is no automatic audience for any website.
• There are only three ways that someone will find a site:
• using a search engine
• following a link from another website
• by a personal recommendation – in an email, on a contact card, in print, TV/radio etc.
Read more ...

More web empowering of the church

More bullets of points made by Mark Stephenson (Ginghamsburg Church) in his online video

Empowering sermons

• Video
• Audio

Empowering discipleship

• E-learning
• Teaching the staff
• Bible Study
• Sunday School
• WEC Flash allows video plus slides

Empowering connection

• Blogs (pastor, youth leaders ... "All youth leaders should think about having a blog", ...)

Devotions, Journaling

• Daily scripture
• Devotional or study
• EMail option

Web Empowering Your Church

Mark Stephenson at Ginghamsburg Church, Tipp City, OH, gives an online Video and synchronized slide presentation, "Web-Empowering the Church".

It's quite good, but plan on spending time -- it's over an hour of streaming video.

The Web-Empowered Church

I pulled some key points from the online video by Mark Stephenson about the Web Empowered Church (WEC) ...

The big 3 pluses of WEC

• Automate ministry processes.
• Store information for easy, immediate access.
• Connect with people anytime from anywhere in the world.

WEC Goals: expand, increase, extend

• Expand evangelism, discipleship, and care.
• Increase ministry efficiency and effectiveness.
• Extend ministry beyond the church walls.

Other points, tips, and ideas

• Web be more cost-effective communication than nearly any other media type. You can fund a web site for a year for the cost of a few mailings from the church.
• You can start with volunteers. The first 1,000 pages at the Ginghamsburg site were done by unpaid servants. The site is now at 4,000 pages, including several years' of text and video of sermons.
• You can minister to people worldwide 24 hours a day.
• You can get the word out immediately.
• Easy 24 x7 member participation (emails; online discussions -- IM, chat, discussion boards, "communities", blogs; ).
• The Web-empowered Church (with a capital C) is NOT a replacement for a physical church. The Internet cannot hug, love, or think.
• Connect people in need with those who can address the need, including requests for help in the community.
• Community Prayer Exchange (Prayer Line = one-to-one). In a community Prayer Exchange, you'll need to address the need of some people to submit a prayer request anonymously.
• "Post a thought or Prayer" -- adds to online display. This is most posted-to page on the Ginghamsburg site.
• Servant connector. List opportunities, then let people check blocks and submit -- match talents to needs.

The state and future of Tweets

The Xconomy blog has an informative posting, Tweets from the Edge: The Ups and Downs of Twitter. It talks about current Twitter use and even a potential change to open source.

Some have described tweets as inane. Some see twitter users as people who are very egotistical. Some view most twitter users as addicts. Yet many are using the service. Is there a good use for Twitter by churches without the church becoming an egotistical addict? I say yes, but not necessarily as many use it now.

What I mostly see in Twitter is a series of daily mundane, inane comments that are kind of ridiculous to "follow". Nobody really cares when you'll be home, what baseball game you are watching, or why the Mets stink, let alone, be subjected to unfathomable tweets such as, "Dude!" as an answer to someone specific.

Wouldn't it be great if churches actually avoided bombarding people with mundane tweets and instead gave them less frequents ones that had some genuine religious content? Church webs, blogs, and Twitter accounts are not personal ones -- they need to reflect the spiritual life of that church. They need to have a deliberate spiritual slant. Christians are called to live "in" the world yet not to be "of" the world. Our online presence should reflect that.

None of this is to say that churches should not set up non-religious webs sites, blogs, or Twitter accounts with the aim to address a specific topic (baseball, computers, whatever). Those type sites need to be designed specifically for non-church people, with minimal reference to the church or a religion. Keep that type site separate from your "normal" church ones.

Churches could very productively use a church Twitter account to:

• Remind members about important functions or meetings.
• Advertise upcoming events.
• Give a spiritual message (limited to 140 characters, of course).
• Pass out urgent news (for example, news of a church closure due to impending bad weather).

Pastors and youth leaders could use Twitter to:

• Reflect on an event that day (with spiritual overtones, not just mundane thoughts).
• Pitch an upcoming church event.
• Thank specific people for helping others (but avoid full names to protect privacy).
• Give a short spiritual message.

This runs counter to current Twitter use, but to gain respectability, avoid irritating people, and give more meaning to church and church-related tweets:

• Limit tweets to significant ones. No bursts of "I'm headed to the store" or "Hot Dawgs! Go Georgia!!"
• Limit tweeting frequency. Start with a maximum of one per day unless urgent news needs to get out. If you are tweeting more than once per day, you are probably losing potential "followers".
• Do a reality check. Ask yourself, "What religious or spiritual meaning does my Tweet have?" If the answer is, "None", seriously consider keeping silent. Tweeting too much on unimportant, non-religious topics by church leaders and organizations can viewed as "for the birds".

Even babies like chunking

Johns Hopkins researchers have found that babies learn better with chunking -- grouped data. While that's news, it's not really so new. After all, web content experts have been advocating chunking of text for quite a while.

Breaking up text into bite-sized chunks in different ways makes it easier to quickly scan for information. No matter how good your content, you can improve it by separating the text into logical chunks -- chunking.

Some good ways to chunk and organize your text include:

• Use heads and subheads
• Use short, simple sentences
  See Write Simple or WebAim's "Writing Clearly and Simply"
  
• Put key information first (inverted pyramid style)
  
• Use short paragraphs (white space between chunked text)
  
• Use lists (unordered or ordered) when possible
  
• Use tables for tabular data
  

Finding a robust, easy CMS

Our church has been seeking a Content Management System (CMS) and new Web Hosting for over a year. The frustration is palpable.

In the process, though, we have come across a couple of very useful sites that let you compare CMS software features and even give them an online trial.

• CMS Matrix
• Open Source CMS

We have also had time to look closely at our list of required and desired Web Hosting features. While that list seemed great at the time, after looking at a feature comparison at CMS Matrix, we revised the list to add specifics about the CMS. The list below shows our current features list for both Web Hosting and a CMS.

Web Hosting

• Offers a Content Management System (CMS) and templates suitable for our church's use.
• The web hosting company must be an established one.
• 24 x 7 support. Email is OK, though phone is better.
• Hosting firm has good ratings (when I can find them).
• A very high percentage web server uptime.
• Web server operating system: Windows 2003 server, Linux, Unix, or Apache (needed for a lot of open source CMS solutions).
• The hosting package includes room for our web to grow (pages/disk space)
• Offers at least 30 email addresses, auto-forwarding, POP access, and Spam filtering.
• Hosting solution is $300 or less per year. (E-Zekiel is way out of our price range for the size web we have.)
• Domain name registration/renewal is inexpensive (these should be very low cost these days).

CMS

• The CMS should let nearly everyone (with minimal orientation) add, edit, or delete text, add or delete images, create or delete pages, and upload files. Templates must be pure CSS -- no use of tables for layout.
• Ability to directly edit the code as well as use a pure GUI.
• Must allow addition of alternate text and/or titles to image code (for accessibility).
• Ability to upload files via FTP or via Web.
• Absolutely no ads or forced frames with hosting company info showing.
• CMS templates must allow inserting of multiple-level menus -- horizontal or vertical or both. Pure CSS menus code is heavily preferred by Java is acceptable.
• The system requires email verification to activate a new account.
• Granular privileges by page or content item.
• Administrator can see who's logged in and disconnect the user if required.
• SSL logins and pages are possible.
• Versioning
• Good online help and developers forums.
• Drag-n-Drop of content
• The system lets you force friendly URLs, not database code characters for "page" URLs.
• Integrated Spell checking of content during editing.
• Users can subscribe to varied "pages" and receive email notification of changes.
• The Administrator can force a less advanced user interface for basic content editors.
• The system allows Undo of content changes.
• A WYSIWYG editor.
• You can schedule posting of content changes.
• The CMS allows sub-sites.
• The CMS provides Web-accessible statistics.
• Support for RSS.
• Support for iCal.
• Event management using the calendar.
• WAI compliant.
• XHTML compliant.
• Allows use of Metadata for content objects.
• Provides blogging capability.
• Provides Chat capability.
• An app to organize FAQs.
• Link management.
• Forms for email.
• Users can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves from email lists.
• Photo gallery.
• Polls.
• Surveys.
• Quizzes.
• Site search.
• Site Map.

New media in ministries

What is "new media" and how can we use it in our church ministries? Aaron Linne has a few videos online about this topic. The introductory one, "New Media for Ministries: What is It?", is below. Here are links to the other videos on Vimeo (so far):

• Interactive Metafiction
• Creative Commons
• Concepting a web page

New Media for Ministries: 101 What is It? from Aaron Linne on Vimeo.

Technology 101 workshop slides

The Digital @ Leadership Network blog put slides to its Technology 101 workshop online. Be patient after clicking on the link -- the slideshow takes a while to appear.

Podcasting trend goes down

The trend in podcasting is downward, when compared to video and blogs, says the "Will Podcasting Survive?" article at the Alex Iskold Technology Blog. Podcasting was an evolution of radio that never made it into our daily lives.

Sure, some "Pod people" downloaded podcasts so they could listen to music (or sermons) while they worked or played, and the idea of being able to subscribe to the audio files just like a blog was neat, but use of Podcasts never reached critical mass.

So you could download a thousand songs into a music player and listen to them anytime. But how often did anyone listen to all those songs? Did they become more like a partially ignored collection? Where was the interaction that a blog provides (assuming you want to comment on a posting)?

And yes, anyone with a computer microphone could create a podcast, but how many did so? Perhaps the average person didn't look at creating podcasts as all that easy. By comparison, commenting on a blog posting is very easy, though many people still just read and do not add comments. some reasons podcasting is on the decline:

• Multimedia videos are cooler than podcasts.
• You can scan a blog for what interests you, but not a podcast.
• You can interact with a blog posting.
• It's easier to jump to what you are looking for in a blog or video. Not so with a podcast.
• Reading a blog is more likely than listening all the way through a podcast.
• The content of a podcast is nearly always music or news. Blogs or video can be anything.
• Competition from commercial media. National Public Radio has podcasts. So does National Geographic, Comedy Central, ESPN, and many others. If you want to listen to streaming audio, you'd be more likely to stay with well-known content providers. On the other hand, many people enjoy reading the journaling and commentary by bloggers and video creators.

Podcasting has been "going out of fashion", Alex says. Today's "in" fad is "out" tomorrow. What impact does that have on church web sites?

• If you have limited resources, don't be too eager to adopt the latest "hot" new web gizmo. Instead, give it a hard look. Ask whether it looks like a fad or a long-term hit. Avoid the fads when you have limited resources.
• Carefully check what resources a new web feature would need -- people, equipment, time, expertise, and money. If you can't afford all the resources, don't adopt the new feature.
• If you really want to give a new feature a try, even with limited resources, look for ways to lessen the resource impact. Perhaps there is a way to "start small" that you can try out before deciding whether to jump in feet first.

Google's custom search engine

Google now has a "Custom Search Engine". You add code on any web page that immeditely adds a special search box. The key is that Google focuses searches on all sites linked on that page.

Possible uses:

• Search blogroll sites.
• Search based on a web page's theme, as shown by sites the page links to.
• Search focused on the links in a links collection page such as "Religion Resources".

Example use

Churches with topic-related pages that also include "Resource" links, "Related sites" links or similar on a page now get added value from a customized search. On a Missions page, for example, the custom search will let a visitor focus a search on any Mission-related sites linked on that page. So each different topic page -- for example worship, youth, and stewardship -- will result in different search results depending on what links appear on those pages.
This seems to be the replacement for the old "Site-flavored search" beta, which no longer works.

This also appears to be a great reason to add links of interest to the topical area of a church web page. Added value to visitors means happier visitors.

Tips for web designers

Here are some uselful links:

• Top 10 books for Web designers
• Top 12 blogging tips
• Web design - setting goals
• Get off your RSS (SitePoint)
• 3 ways to make a good first impression
• Great church web sites - things to do
• Great church web sites - things to avoid

Sermon post format

Using the content suggestions at OurChurch, below is a sample template for a sermon posting in a Pastor's blog:

---

Bible passage(s): [link(s) to an online bible]

Key Bible verse: [link to an online bible]

Sermon Title:

• Main point 1
• Sub-point 1
• Sub-point 2
• Main point 2
• Sub-point 1
• Sub-point 2
• Sub-point 3
• Main point 3
• Sub-point 1
• Sub-point 2

Action step: [The specific action you want people to take in the coming days as a result of this message.]

Dig deeper: [linked references for added information related to the sermon topic.]

• Reference 1
• Reference 2
• Reference 3

Ask the pastor: Click on the "comments" link at the bottom of this posting or contact me at the church's email address. [The "contact me" link could go to the church's "Contact" web page or the actual church email address for the pastor.]

Traits of a great web site

Titus Hoskins in SitePro News lists seven traits of a great web site:

• Keywords are used
• Design is simple
• Pages are optimized
• Navigation is easy
• Content is fresh
• Good enough to bookmark
• Looks cool

Content in Pastors' blogs

What content should appear in a pastor's blog? Anything they want, of course. On the other hand, it depends on why the blog was created and the purpose of the blog.

Pastors may arrive at a church with a blog already. They may well use it for publishing daily happenings (journal style) and musings. If the church wants "their" Pastor's blog to integrate with the church web and church worship, the church and pastor need to discuss a blog that is directly tied to the church. Both type blogs can exist at the same time. Authoring multiple blogs is common.

The Christian Web Trends blog posting lists some great content ideas for "Supercharging sermons with a blog", which I have added to the below tips.

Come decision points about pastor blog content and design on which the church and pastor need to reach agreement:

• If the pastor has or wants a personal journal type blog, is the pastor also willing to author a pastor's blog that is a more direct extension of the local church?
• Should the design integrate with the church web design or its existing blogs?
• Should the pastor's blog contain any sermon texts, summaries, or outlines? Sermon messages can be one form of online evangelism.
• Should a "Sermon blog" be a separate blog or mixed in with the other postings in the church's Pastor's blog?
• Should the church offer (and link) sermon podcasts or video?
• Should the blog allow comments, as is the norm?
• Should any comments should be "moderated", so as to avoid anti-Christian rants and foul language appearing in blog comments? Yes, of course!
• Should the blog contain short "point of view" postings about spiritual life in a secular world? These could be "thought for the week" style, supplement a past sermon, or based on the pastor's and congregation's daily life experiences.

Sermon information

If the pastor's blog will contain sermon information, decide the following:

• When should such information be posted?
  Immediately or after a week or two delay?
  Some pastors and church leaders may fear that offering full text or even outlines immediately might lower actual church attendance. Others may want to immediately offer the message to shut-ins or people who were unable to attend church.
• Should it be full text, paragraph summary, or outline?
  I suggest a two-level outline format, which is easiest to scan. After all, research shows that most surfers scan, not read text on web pages. An outline of two levels includes the key points and yet is short.

Add sermon resource links

If posting sermon outlines, help people dig deeper by stirring in:

• Links to resources related to the sermon topic. Remember that your own church web may contain information or related link collections.
• Links to bible passages for the sermon.
• Titles of materials available in the church library.
• Links to Books, say available from Cokesbury, that are a really great reference.

Add the "So what?"

Sermons at their best are like editorials, not just commentary. Editorials urge their readers to take action. Here's the pastor's chance to reinforce the Christian actions that readers should take in their lives during the coming days and weeks. The Christian Web Trends blog calls these "Action Steps." Be specific. Make each action step short. Use bullets – make the action steps easy to scan.

Encourage contact

If you have enabled comments, your blog postings automatically have a way to "contact us". Some readers, though, may wish to contact the pastor personally, not via a blog comment. So it's best to also add a "Contact us" link. Since this is a Pastor's blog that is tied to your church, how about adding a "Send a prayer request" link too? It couldn't hurt and might be just what some blog reader needs.

Methoblogger Lectionary & other helps

When your pastor, teachers, or any other interested people want to get someone else's take on Common Lectionary readings for the week, surf on over to "The Methoblogger Lectionary Group" site.

There are a ton of helpful web sites and blogs related to preaching and teaching. Add to that web pages helpful to various committees and work areas in the church and you have the makings of a great resource page for your web.

Gather a list of such links and put them on a special "leader helps" type web page, similar to what Avondale Pattillo United Methodist Church has done.

Pastor blog uses

Your congregation might well benefit from a blog authored by your pastor. Why? Your church web site needs to include changing content -- content that will keep people coming back. A pastor's blog is one of many parts to a complete church web site, even for a basic site that's not "fancy":

Some types of static information church web pages:

• Information pages (who we are, what we believe, service information, location, contact information, ...)
• Resource pages (links to spiritual topics and online tools)

Some types of dynamic (changing) web pages:

• Photo albums
• Church news
• Pastor's blog
• Syndicated news
• Syndicated religious cartoons

Here are a few of the many possible uses for a pastor's blog:

• A weekly (or more frequent) pithy spiritual message, musing, or "thought for the week"
• Sermon texts
• Sermon summaries
• Sermon supplemental references (linked)
• Topics related to the denomination

I believe that the below possibilities are of much lower interest and value in a pastor's blog:

• "Pitches" for upcoming events.
  This type subject might be a low-interest item and better suited to a church newsletter or Sunday bulletin supplement.
• "Congratulations" on past events.
  Such items might be better posted in a church news blog or online newsletter.

Communications tips

The Web Evangelism Bulletin has a ton of tips and sample sites each issue, some of which apply to general communications or writing. Here's a few gleaned from that bulletin since November ...

• Communicating Well
• Writing tips
• Boomers and Gen-Xers communicate differently