Telling Connections

Serving Those Who Choose Not to Connect to Web

A pastor told me the story about his encounter with a person who asked him if he could make his blog posts available to those without computers. "I do not have a computer. I am not going to get a computer. But, I have heard that your writing is something that I should read."

This question puts a spotlight on an issue of service. Most of the members of our churches have computers. Most of our members regularly view their e-mail (though 95% of it in 2007 has been spam).

Most, not all.

Even if a family has a computer, that family may have it because of the needs of the children, work, or membership in an organization. I know of several whose careers mandate the use of computers everyday. One way these persons have chosen to enforce the boundary between work and family time, is not to use a computer at home - even though other members of the family do.

There are many people who choose to use other tools. One person shared with me, "If you want to get hold of me, your best bet is to use the phone. I read my e-mail about once a week, if that." This person is not alone.

The easiest strategy is to employ just one or two tools of communication to connect with people of the church. However, this misses many people. This is another case of the "either-or's."  It would be easiest for me to rationalize, "She has chosen not to use the medium that I connect with, therefore, she has chosen not to connect. That's her choice." Easiest, but is this the attitude of Christ?

Connecting with people requires each of us to first look to the needs of others rather than ourselves. Remember the Apostle Paul's words to the Philippians (2:1-12)?  If the person has an interest in learning or has already chosen to use a communication medium that you prefer then you can serve by using that medium. But, if that person has chosen another medium, also use that medium that he or she has chosen.

My suggestion to the pastor who was asked to make available the content of his blog to those without computers: Design an attractive header, then copy and paste each blog post under the header, print it out and place each on the church literature rack.

Do an inventory of the communication strategies you are using. Are those who want to make connection with you able to?

Guard Your Domain Name

Do not let the registration of your domain name expire! Guard this name - the address that finds your site. Don't let the registration for www.yourchurch.org - run out. If it does, you probably will never get that special name back again!

Our web team keeps posted on the ABC/GRR web site a list of all churches in the Region with active web sites. From time to time I go through the list looking to see what churches are doing.

The first time I reviewed this list after setting it up, I found one church's web address lead me to a site that was not theirs at all. I checked to make sure that I had entered the address correctly. I had. What was more distressing is that the content of the site was what most of us would call raunchy, even pornographic. But, the address was the one that spelled out the church's name.

How would you react if you were looking for a church and entered or "Googled" what seemed to be a legitimate church name and found such material? How would you feel if you had heard that your church had a web site and you thought you'd take a look?

When I checked on this - after deleting this address from the list - I found out what had happened. Someone in the church had been given the responsibility of setting up and maintaining the new web site. No team was developed. After a couple of years, that person who was "doing the web site" moved away.

• The web site became grossly out of date.
• The web site stayed, unchanged, but not forever - only until its address' registration ran out.
• Then another company purchased the address' registration and changed the material at that address.

This often happens when only one person is responsible for a site; however, even when a team is responsible, if the church allows their ownership of their address' registration to run out that name is most likely gone. Even if one person or a group is keeping the site up to day, but no one renews the registration of the address, the church will end up losing its chosen web address.

Losing the address does not always lead to such an embarrassing situation;however, losing your original address is always at least very inconvenient. It means having to come up with another domain (address) that isn't being used, registering it with a reputable domain registration company, and putting out notices to your church, community, and world that your address has changed.

Complicating all of this is that your original name will still be used, but by someone else. This is especially true because of what has become known as "domain farming." There are people who have started businesses and make a profit from gathering up those addresses (domain names) whose registrations have not been renewed by their original owners.

These domain farmers register these domains in their own names. They keep the name active with a site composed of any material they wish hoping that the original owners will pay more to them to get it back.

If you are a church and this happens to you:

• You probably will not get this original name back.
• Grieve it. Put it behind you. Go on.
• Then compose and register another name.
• Publicize this change.
• KEEP THE NEW DOMAIN (ADDRESS) REGISTRATION UP TO DATE.

Make Your Site More than a Brochure

Connecting is more than viewing; it is conversing.

There are basically 2 ways that you can use your web site to connect.

• Keep it up-to-date - implicitly interactive.
• Make it explicitly interactive.

Keeping it up-to-date gives a perception that you are interacting with others because you in a similar time frame as they are.

• Post notices of what is coming up this week - You are interacting with users' need for information.
• Post reports with images and video of what has happened - You are offering experiences that people interact with as they review what has happened and offering others' perspectives of these events.
• Post reports about weather-caused needs and what your church is doing about them. - You offer the opportunity for others to serve, to interact, to connect.

Include interactive opportunities on your site.

• Include links to related and extended information from other sites that is relevant to what you are posting. Paradoxically this will keep your users coming back to your site - for more links like this. Your site is now perceived as a "portal" through which your users can access more of what they want. This is the strength of the internet.
• Include links to related material on your own site, too.
• Include quizzes, surveys, crosswords, interactive calendars (with links), registration forms, blogs, forums, bulletin boards. (These do not require a great deal of coding knowledge. Ready-to-go examples and templates are available for free either from your web host or from reputable distributors on the net.)

The end result of your work is that more people will use your site more often. When this happens, more people through word of mouth start to be introduced to your church.

Who Is Your Audience?

Your church has "put up" a web site. Who is it for?

Let's review the "usual suspects."

• Active Church Members
• In-active Church Members
• Church Web Team
• Pastor
• Influential Church Member
• Community
• People looking for a church in your community
• People looking for help with life's struggles
• Persons looking for a portal to faith issues discussed on the web
• Others. You name them, but name them by what they are looking for.

Notice how wide and how specific this list can be?

When professional designers and writers develop a web site's material, they develop a personna of a person of their targeted audience. Some teams even take a picture of a person and put it up in a place of the common work area for all to see. This underscores the need to develop material that not only communicates with but also presents material that this person and people like her need.

Let's say you have discerned that your target is a person who is new to the community, may be searching for meaning and community in life for herself and her family. What are some ideas for material that your web site should feature?

• Church history?
• Athletic Schedule?
• FAQ's on Faith and Life?
• Links to family ministries?
• A column by a member or staff member on Faith and Family?
• Calendar of Activities?
• E-mail and telephone contacts?
• Map to the church with times when the church is open?
• Listing of small group activities?
• Service and Mission opportunities?
• What we believe in a creed-like listing of "-ologies"?
• Links to a blog about life's struggles and faith's role?
• A description of what to expect when coming to and participating in a service for the first time?
• Church activities for family?

Add to this list, but put a question mark after each idea.

Now look at this person. Review this person's characteristics and life situation. Then choose those ideas from your list that are most appropriate. Drop the rest. Then either make this the home page of the entire site, or the home page of a well-designated section of the main site.

Who'd Have 'Thunk'?

My favorite television program on Saturday during my early teen years was "Game of the Week." If I remember correctly it was on NBC. One reason that it was my favorite was the colorful descriptions and stories of past baseball players by the broadcasters Peewee Reese, Curt Gowdy Sr, and Dizzy Dean. I remember one remarkable discussion following one player's stealing of third base. Dizzy used the words, "he slud into third." Gowdy's reaction: "You mean slid, don't you." Dizzy responded by saying his "slud" came from slide, slud, just like sing, sung. 

Dizzy wasn't the best grammarian, but he was colorful. His descriptions and his stories attracted and engaged those watching.

People, young and old, are always looking for this type of engagement in worship services. When it is not there their spirit's sense a boredom, irrelevancy, and gloom. Yet, worship is a time of accepting and participating in God's invitation to be present. Wonders! Miracles! Stories of God's work! Sensing God's presence!

Area III of the ABC Great Rivers Region have invited and scheduled Len Wilson and Jason Moore of Midnight Oil Productions to share a seminar on Creative Worship.  This seminar will be hosted by First Baptist Church of Peoria IL on March 8, 2008. This seminar is not purposed to demonstrate technology, but to engage us in better facilitating worship of our God through intentionally designing and implementing worship services. "Creative" Worship is meant to stretch us to use verbal, audio, visual, and even kinesthetic cues to engage worshippers...to take the metaphors of this age, redeem them, and use them to witness to God's work in Jesus Christ.

Whether or not you choose to register and participate in this seminar, ask yourself "What can I do to help our worship service better engage people of all ages and offer them a "holy and safe place" pregnant with the opportunity to encounter God?"

A Web Editor's Christmas List

Here it is:

1. The site honors God
2. It serves users' needs
3. Users are learning
4. The server is ALWAYS up.
5. Broken links automatically repaired
6. Sites linked to are always up-to-date
7. Adobe reduces price on its software
8. RSS Scrapers (automatically generates news feeds from site) more user friendly
9. PDFs submitted for posting never exceed 250 kb.
10. Image compression software more efficient (better quality for less size).
11. Navigation systems with less bulk (to not eat up screen real estate).

Some of these reflect frustration; some of these reflect my life's purpose. But all of these are familiar to all of us who plan, authorize, design, publish, and edit web sites.

Blessed and Wonderful Christmas

webmaster

Help Others Stay Up-to-Date with Your Web Site

Your web site is one in a billion. It may be that good, but it is for sure just one in a vast ocean of web sites and blogs available for people to use.

Your web editor may be very diligent in keeping your site up-to-date. However, the number of people who are using your site may be going down. Does that mean that your site is not needed? Not necessarily. It may be that your users have started to become dependent upon notifications that something on your site has changed.

That notification is more and more being done through RSS feeds. RSS is a way of helping those who want to keep up with news and stories on many different blogs and now more and more web sites. In fact some writers are urging that all web sites publish an RSS feed. You've seen on web sites those little orange symbols with white concentric arcs depicting broadcoasting action. (They may have the letters RSS, XML, or ATOM on them, too.)

If you have your blog or web pages of your site to automatically "feed out" (or using an rss scraper or manual publishing) that you have a new article on the web page then when you upload that page to your web hosting service computer a summary notice of the headline and a first few words of the story will be sent out (syndicated) to those who use software that keeps them informed of new news. This software is called news aggregators or readers.

The reason these are used more and more is that people do not have to navigate to your site and study it to see if there is something new on it. They have it "fed" to them. Then they can go and find it quickly through the link provided by their news reader.  Now people can feed their information addiction by keeping up with tens if not hundreds of sites and blogs instead of a few.

The most recent editions of Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, and Safari all offer the opportunity to make a link to these automatic "feeds" of news.  A full service freebie that I use is Sharp Reader.

This trend to peruse RSS feeds before looking at web sites underscores the need for web sites to be current and fresh.

Do People Know Your Church Has a Web Site?

"O the weather outside is frightful..." Freezing rain. The township plow just past spreading some sand and salt. The driver was going all of 5 miles per hour.

Frightful is also the experience of wondering if anyone is using that wonderful site your church just posted. How can your church staff increase the chance that it is.

First, do all the active members of your church know that your church has one and how to get to it?
Include the address of the church site in the bulletin each Sunday. Also include the e-mail address.

Second, do all inactive members and friends of the church know? Include the web address of your church's site in the masthead of your church's newsletter and in the masthead or footer of your church's official stationery.

Third, do other churches know that you have the site? Make sure that the community chamber of commerce web authors have your address in their church listings.

Fourth, does your greater Church family know? For churches who are affiliated with the ABC Great Rivers Region, please forward your church's web site address to Candy Stivers. She will make sure that it is included in your church's contact information in the GRR's Directory of Churches.

Fifth, does the world know? There are many strategies for this. One that has worked for the ABC GRR, especially to be highly ranked in Google, is to develop a specialty page of specific information (not of a private nature) or special interest. If you "Google" on "advantages of pdf" Google will list the ABC GRR as one of the top listings. The Staff of the GRR developed a page of information explaining why the Staff chose it as the default format for web documents and e-mail attachments. This quickly morphed to suggesting ways to get less expensive software so that churches who could not see their way to affording Adobe's Full Acrobat Program could find alternative ways to convert documents to this format. So many people around the world have used this page - with the ABC GRR masthead - that it is consistently ranked as one of the top pages when "pdf advantages" or similar terms are used in a Google search.

There are many other ways. Don't immediately go for offers to get the word out about your site for a fee. There are other ways that do not require payment. The ABC GRR has never paid for getting the word out. The President of the GRR auxilary American Baptist Women's Ministries made up business card-like ads and gave them out with her organizations web address.

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant in Web Marketing Today, June 14,  2006 lists and explains 32 ways to get the word out.

The best way will always be word of mouth. What motivates word of mouth but a consistently better and useful site. Work towards excellence in design and substance and people will find your site. Use the strategies written and referred to above and people will find what a few now know.

Better Serve Others with Your Web Page

Many church members begin their web ministry efforts with great excitement. But, after awhile, this initial fun gives way to work.

Golfers have heard, "Drive for show. Putt for dough [as in $]." Long and accurate drives off the tee are exciting to watch and very satisfying to hit. I have had that feeling about 3 times in 30 years of golfing. But, the real satisfaction comes to golfers when they can chip and/or putt accurately enough to have a chance to score par or better. This takes a disciplined approach of studying the lay and speed of the green, imaging the completed shot/putt, and a near perfect stroking of the ball with the club. Not just once, but every with every tee,  fairway, rough, and green of each hole (in my case around 90 strokes) demands this attention.

Web sites and their pages require the same disciplined attention. Instead of different clubs, webmasters use different software programs to post what will be winners for those who use their sites. This means that webmasters need to be able to use not only web page editors but also image, audio, video, word processing, and file transfer software. These need to be used not just once but with each weekly update.

As I surf church web sites, I learn a great deal. I even use some of these in the ABC/GRR pages. Sometimes what I learn is a challenge to me not to repeat the same mistake. Here is a list of what I have found can be done better by all of us.

• Update the home page at least once per week. (Lack of this is the most often voiced reason that users do not return. Having a web team helps by providing more to share the work.)
• Adjust the size of images and graphics to allow quick downloads. (Resizing the images dimensions does not do this. Resample (go from camera resolution to web resolution of 72 dpi), not resize.
• Ask yourself, if I had limited eyesight, could I use this sight?
• Walls of Words. Allow your eyes to de-focus on your page(s). Do you see large grey squares (composed of the words of paragraphs? Learn to write short sentences; short paragraphs.
• Does your page have enough graphics and images?
• Does your page have too many graphics and images?
• Can a person not familiar with your sight find what you want them to find quickly?
• Is there something waiting for your user with each step in the menu navigation?
• Can a person with a slower dialup connection use this page without frustration, or should you provide another page that is smaller - without most of the graphics and images.

Here are two resources to help you on these issues and more.

First, Ginny Redish's Letting Go of the Words is an excellent manual - nearly all inclusive - that I believe all webmasters should have next to their computers.

Second, the web tech section of the ABC GRR web site has many articles and how-tos. These are mostly short writings that also list additional helpful resources.

How Your Website Can Be the Best It Can Be

I have been learning a lot from the web sites of the churches of the Great Rivers Region. I appreciate the creativity and innovation of many who are using this tool for ministry. My learnings have been posted on the home page of the GRR web site in the form of series of articles of how churches are using this tool.

As I investigate these sites I have noticed clues that some of these are - or were - maintained by only one person. Many times this is the pastor.  Some have refused to have a web site because of this. Others have thought that contracting with a company to design and maintain your web site costs too much. I agree. I once priced what it would cost the GRR to have one designed and maintained with the number of pages and features we have. The cost was guestimated as in the thousands of dollars. You don't have to spend the money to have a good site, but you do need to spend the time learning and training those called by God from your congregation to do so.

Otherwise, there are missed opportunities. Many minds in collaboration make for a better web site. A web design and maintenance team also lessens the chance that a church's web site will get out of date. One single person does not have enough time to do it all from designing to testing to posting. But, if several people construct a schedule, then it can be done and done well.

Recruit and train a team to do it. Yes, there will need to be one team leader. That might be you, but even if it is, you can turn this into a discipling, even small group growth opportunity.

For example, though I am the team leader of the web technologies for the GRR, there are several staff members who help maintain the site. I may explore and test additions to the site and make sure that the site is "up" as often as is possible, but the church directory, area news, ab men, ab women, and many other divisions are maintained by others. If it takes me longer than 10 minutes per day to maintain a part of the site, I look for another to help out. For instance posting the Mainstream and posting Dr. Stinnett's Current Thoughts each take less than 10 minutes to convert to pdf, upload, and update the index pages for each.

The best service you can do for all those who would use your site is to have it up-to-date. Have your team member(s) change something on the home page at least once per week.

Design it so that the opening page is about what is happening now. Put the listing of sermons to be preached or available as downloads on another page. Put the church history on another page. Put links to these on the home page of your site.

What's the condition of your church's web site today. What can you do to make sure that it is updated before next week?