CPC Website Ministry FAQ

This set of FAQs is a resource discussion of many issues involved with creating and maintaining websites for churches or other ministries. It includes many issues not generally covered in general website design discussions such as advantages of a church site, defining your site's purpose, interfacing with your church leadership and what you need to think about to get started.

We enjoy participating in discussions about church/ministry webdesign and we periodically receive inquiries about our site and its development from other webmasters, and especially from church website developers. This page attempts to answer the most common questions and to discuss some issues you may come across as you develop church or ministry websites. What you will read is based upon a great deal of discussion, reading and thought, augmented and refined by our practical experience of developing and maintaining Central's website since 1996.

We certainly recognize that our ways and opinions aren't necessarily the only or best ways to do things, but it's what has worked for us so far and we hope this is helpful for you. We'd be glad to receive any feedback, corrections, suggestions or discussion.

By the way... Happy 10th Birthday to Central's Website!

Format Note: Generally we wouldn't recommend this much content in one page. We've left it in one long page for now to make it easy to maintain and to print the whole FAQ.

Table of Contents

Generally, we'd recommend just reading through the whole thing, start to finish. We think you'll find it worthwhile and more coherent than reading individual answers.

Website Ministry Philosophy and Policies

1. What are the advantages of having a church website?

   This is somewhat difficult to quantify, but from logic and anecdotal evidence, we can say that there are a number of real benefits.

   • It allows potential visitors or those searching for a church to learn a lot about us before committing to a visit. We especially try to make the first visits easier with our Visiting Central Pres. page. We've had a number of visitors and even new members tell us the site helped them decide to come to Central.

   • It offers a single, accessible, persistent source for most church information. The site is always there, can be accessed by anyone (who has internet access), and is kept current, unlike other paper communications. Communications can be posted more quickly than mailings, though they can't be relied upon to reach nearly everyone. How much your site realizes this benefit does, of course, depend upon how much info you provide and how good you are at keeping it current and accurate. Note that even our staff members often use the site to look up some detail they need to know. It's quick and comprehensive.

   • It is useful in recruiting staff. We can post job descriptions that are much longer than we could afford in paid advertising medium (classifieds or magazines). Our paid print ads can be short (ie inexpensive) but can reference the website for that additional information. Similarly, listings on internet job seeker sites can link back. Also, prospective applicants can learn about us before committing to an application. The site has already helped us recruit several members of our staff.

   • The sermon section allows members/friends or visitors to read sermons that they may have missed. It's a great teaching resource that also gives visitors a feeling for what and how we teach. This is one area that I (jw) feel strongly about, since it is an area that can be useful to any visitor, unlike the more specific information about this or that ministry at our church. See also the short discussion about sermon transcripts vs. audio files. This argument also applies to teaching materials of all kinds, not just sermons of course.

   • It can facilitate communications between members and with others using various online aids such as email lists, discussion forums, posting sections, etc. For instance common online community tools can help your small groups communicate within their groups. Some of the Template, CMS or Database-based Website Development Systems have really interesting capabilities in this respect.

   • It can help build your youth as a community. With a strong youth ministry section, your youth can have a way to not only keep up with what's going on, but to communicate with you and with each other during the week. For further discussion on this, see Youth/Student Ministries Section.

   • We've been able to really focus our congregation on some distant missions opportunities via the site. We had one missions trip where our senior pastor and an elder went to southeast asia and sent back email reports each day. We put up a whole section on the web about the trip and posted the email reports as they came in. A number of people logged on together as as families to read the new mail for each day. It worked out as a great way to increase the visibility of both the web site and the missions trip. Members felt much more connected with the trip and with the people that Ron and George visited.

   • Jim Wilson discusses this topic in an article that appeared in Growing Churches Summer '99 issue; Should Your Church Have a Web Site?

2. Do you have written guidelines or policies that tell the various ministries of the church how they can take advantage of your website, what they can have published there and can the individual ministries design and maintain their own pages?

   We don't have a policy for content other than the precautions on privacy and missionary safety. We basically post whatever we can get from CPC staff or members, often with some editing but with the format under our control. If anything, we'd rather get more people offering content. Judgement is mostly up the the webmaster at the moment for what is appropriate or what needs editing.

   If someone wants to expand a section or work with us, we'll meet with them and discuss what they have in mind and what we can do. That is far more flexible and workable than written guidelines.

   For maintaining the look, we have a small team (2 1) actually doing the html with one in charge. We've made a set of templates and editing guidelines for our current page designs that provide much of the layout and look. So, it's mostly self-discipline plus the templates.

3. How do you handle the issue of what member info (names, phones, photos, etc) to post on the site?

   We had an unofficial policy on this until someone from another church asked us this question, thus making us write it down to answer him. See our CPC Information Privacy Policy.

   See also Heal Your Church Web Site: HIPAA (HIPPA), Disclosures and your Church Website for some thoughts and warnings about both website information privacy and prayer chain privacy.

   For some (slight) protection against emails being harvested by spambots, we have been encoding any emails listed on the site in HTML entities, and at very least encoding the @ symbol with @. This certainly isn't foolproof, and spambots can certainly be written to decode it, but, according to some tests, even minimal email munging will help reduce spambot harvesting.

   Posting photos of people on your site will bring up a few other privacy issues. You can see what we've done so far in our privacy policy, but our basic guidelines are:

   • Including photos in our site is a privilege for us, and we intend to respect and honor it.
   • Photos are almost always of people in public spaces, at public events.
   • We try not to post anything that would be embarrassing, objectionable or hurtful to anyone in the photo. If we know someone is shy about such things, we ask them before posting the photo.
   • Applying other parts of our general privacy policy, we don't put full names of children or youth as captions with photos, and we minimize how often we use full names of adults.
   • We will gladly provide credit for who took a particular photo if desired by the photographer, and we would certainly honor any copyright wishes or restrictions.
   • We make it clear that we'll gladly remove any photo immediately upon request.

   As a related note, some companies who do church photo directories are now offering an option of online access to the member photos (with names and addresses?) as well as the normal printed directories. At this point the privacy and access concerns outweigh the value of that for us so our member directory is not online in any form, even behind login control. Discussion on this issue is welcomed though.

4. Missionary Safety Note

   Be VERY careful about listing info about missionaries that you may be supporting, discussing or associate with. Sometimes they are in countries where they would be in danger if it were known that they are 'missionaries' or even christian. In some countries, it is actually illegal to be there as a christian missionary and they could be imprisoned, attacked, deported or even killed.

   • Don't post info, even names, organizational affiliations, email addresses, country/city/location or photos, without the explicit permission of that missionary.
   • Dangerous information can include names, organizational affiliations, email addresses, country, location, groups they are working with, stories, anecdotes, support or financial info, photos or names of their friends, associates or co-workers.
   • Anything that associates the person or group with christian or missions work can be dangerous in some places.
   • Even information about prior missionary jobs in 'safe' countries can be a risk if a missionary moves to a less-safe place.
   • Be careful about posting photos of the missionaries and/or people they work with. Even without captions they could be a problem.
   • Don't even post the info behind member-login access control since that can be hacked or someone may copy or send the info to someone else.
   • Even taking down info that was once posted may not completely remove it since there are copies of website data in various archives such as the Google cache and the Wayback Archive.
   • Check explictly with the missionary first if there is any question about particular information.
   • Make it a habit for everyone in your webteam to check all missions info with either the missionary or your missions coordinator before posting.
   • It's hard to catch everything even if you take this very seriously, particularly if you are posting church newsletters, articles, sermons etc. Take it seriously and periodically check through your site for slips.

   Remember, the web is global, and anyone can find the information you post, sometimes just by using search engines. What you put online is public, now and maybe forever.

   FWIW, we're not exaggerating this danger. We have it straight from various people who have been in the situation where even the local government was looking hard online for information to prove that they were there as missionaries, and persecuting them as a result of even the suspicion.

Some Recommendations for Getting Started

1. Before you start, spend some time planning and talking to figure out what kind of site you want to have. Some of the questions you might want to ask are:
   • What kind of info do you envision, and how often will you update it? Are you just going to have an online brochure-type site with just basic contact info, service schedule, etc that doesn't get updated often... or perhaps something people are drawn back to by ever-changing content and current, detailed information? This could even be an online discussion forum/community.

     Warning: if you let the info go 'stale,' it can be useless. If you post the type of information that should stay current, keep it current or remove it. (yes, we know this can be a struggle, we get behind at times too) See the discussion below of How often to update.

   • Focus: Is your site focussed on info for your members or on drawing outsiders in? Is it about a ministry or a tool of that ministry to teach/reach others? Or perhaps to provide some resource to the general internet community (lessons? study guides?) To use a despised marketing term... who is your target audience?

   • Message: What are you trying to get across about your church? Beyond address and service times... Try to show what makes *your* church different, or worth visiting. What things are important to your community of faith; your focus? Music? Missions? Youth Ministry? Social Action? Elder Ministry? Urban Ministry? Great donuts? Hopefully most churches are centrally focussed on Jesus Christ, but that love is expressed in many different forms. What's yours?

     Note that visitors may guess about your ministry priorities by what areas show the most information or detail. Quantity doesn't always equal priority, but it may be taken that way.

   • Skill level: Who will build and maintain the site? What skills do they have or can they build. Remember that you learn a lot as you do this and that there is benefit in redesigning your site periodically. It shows that someone is actively working on it.

   • Design: What things to you like on other websites? What things do you hate? Start with that, figure out how to do what you want to do 'right now,' go from there. Researching other related sites can give you good ideas.

   • Structure: Once you know what types of info you want to post, try to organize it into understandable sections and hierarchy. Remember this Jakob Neilson tip: Define categories in terms of user goals. "It's amazing how many Web sites use an information architecture based on how the company that owns the site is structured. That's not helpful to anyone, even (in most cases) to employees. Your site's categories should be defined in terms of what users want when they come to your site, not how your organization is structured."

2. Work with your Church/Ministry Staff and Leaders. We'd strongly encourage anyone planning and designing a site to communicate with their pastor(s) or other leaders and staff and explain what they want to do, and how it could benefit the ministry, and seek his/her/their input so that the leadership does not become an obstacle. It's also a good idea since they won't buy in and really support you if you don't include them.

   Lastly, they'll probably be able to provide additional good ideas for content for the site, as well as being able to tell you when something would mean too much work for them. This can be especially true of your office staff. You'll need to work out ways for them to provide you with content, in forms you can use easily, but without greatly increasing their burdens. Your office staff can be either a logjam or a fantastic partner, depending upon how you work with them.

3. Be somewhat informal in your writing style, it's more friendly and attractive. Remember, you're writing about this great group of people you get together with to worship this amazing God. You're not writing a business plan. A sense of humor, enjoyment of life and light-heartedness helps show that there are real, interesting people behind that website, maybe even a church of them worth visiting.

4. Talk with others. Other webmasters love to talk about what they do and why (I wrote all this didn't I ;-) There are forums, websites, mailing lists for all aspects of everything. Better yet, don't be shy about sending an email to the webmaster of some site you like. Compliment him/her on their work and ask questions. Ask for feedback from your members and site visitors too. Often they have great ideas that you've never thought of.

5. Quality is important, but it's not everything. The quality of your site, expressed in look, usability, spelling, working links, good html, quick loading, clear navigation, etc is important. It will get across that someone cares enough to be careful and diligent and it will make using your site less frustrating and more effective. However, remember that people are very forgiving and will spend their time reading even the ugliest, most frustrating sites if the sites have something that they are interested in. We're not advocating carelessness or poor design but rather the idea that ultimately, content is more important than looks, or even design. If you have something worth saying, put it up the best you can for now and improve it when you can.

6. Most of all, don't be too intimidated by the whole website design thing.
   Sure, making an amazing site takes work, thought, time and skill, but you can build that skill yourself as you go. We started out knowing almost nothing about HTML, websites, etc and learned as we did it. You do what you know how to do the best you can at that time. As you learn new things that will improve the site, you apply them.

   We're not the best site around by any means, but what worked for us was to talk it over, then dive in. Learn by doing it, reading about it (on other web resources), talking about it. As we go we add all we can, within our existing structure... until we outgrow it, then we redesign the whole thing to grow some more... and again and keep going... (don't forget to clean out the outdated stuff now and then though)

Thoughts About Particular Website Sections

Discussions related to particular parts of church or ministry websites.
The article, Everything, Plus the Kitchen Sink offers a great list of things generally included on church sites.

1. Visitor's Information Section
   Information for potential visitors is one of the most important sections of your website. It may not be organized together as one section, but all of the following information should be especially clear, easy to find and linked together. It should generally include things such as:
   1. Church address, phone numbers, FAX numbers, email addresses. (generally on the home page or contact and/or staff pages)
   2. Maps and written directions on how to get to your church
   3. Times and locations of worship services or other events.
   4. Information about parking if necessary.
   5. Photos of the church if possible, outside and inside.
   6. A general welcome letter and possibly a page written specifically for visitors.

   An article in Church Web Monthly Magazine (churchwebmonthly.com - now-defunct) convinced us that a page written specifically for visitors was a critical part of the website. We spent a fair amount of time on this one page (Visiting Central Pres.) to include all the information we thought might help someone just visiting for the first time.

   In particular, we want it to be friendly and welcoming and not to make assumptions about what visitors know. There are many people who haven't grown up going to church or to the same kind of church who might feel uncomfortable or feel that they don't know exactly what to do. They may have no idea of what to expect of your church, or even of *any* church. You can answer all sorts of questions that you might normally take for granted and allay a lot of worries before a visitor every crosses your doorway.

   That will help a lot to make newcomers feel welcome and as comfortable as possible, telling them even simple details before they visit. When writing your own, try to think how a diverse group of people might see your church if coming the first time and write for them. (and use lots of links to photos and the other info mentioned above)

   Here are a few good examples that we've run across. Feel free to suggest others.

   • Visiting Central Pres. (ours)
   • Akron-Springfield Assembly of God - Visiting ASAG
   • Grace Community, Orange County, CA (archived version)

2. Sermons/Teaching Section

   We've been putting sermons online since 1998. In that time we've gone from posting sporadic transcripts to consistently posting all transcripts as well as MP3-format audio files of sermons. We've also moved from having volunteers transcribe the sermons and pastors proof-read them to having transcription done by a paid professional transcription service and editing/proof-reading done by a volunteer. It's been a priority for us, so I'd like to discuss it a bit.

   Our purpose and philosophy behind posting them is two-fold:

   1. To reach out to the global internet community access with what we consider important christian teaching in ways that are easy to find and use.
   2. To give members, visitors and friends lasting access to the teaching for times when they miss it, want to review or save it, or want to pass it on to someone else.

   Some might think "sermons are boring, who'd want to read those." Obviously this depends somewhat upon your teachers/speakers, and we've been blessed to have excellent teaching at cpc, but from our experience, the sermons do get a fair amount of attention. People really do want to find answers to spiritual questions and they do want to hear what you have to teach. Don't be shy. This material may be the only thing on your website that really goes into detail on important issues. Most of the rest of your site may be more about what your church is, what it's doing, inviting people to come, etc. This may be your best contribution to a wider community and it may strongly affect people's lives. While email feedback is fairly sparse, we've had people facing some real personal crises write about how something they read in our sermons helped them through it. You may be touching someone alone in a hotel room somewhere who can't approach anyone personally in their pain. It matters!

   Just by numbers, our sermon section now consistently gets about 30% of our site's total page hits, and a lot of traffic directly from search engines. Search engines can index the actual content of sermon transcripts the sermon, so people asking questions or searching by keyword can come directly to them. Likewise, our own site's search engine can help visitors find teaching by keyword search. For some further discussion of how to put them online, see Sermon Transcripts vs. Audio Files. and About copywriting and protecting content...

   Interestingly, we have gotten some interesting webstats showing that some sermons consistently get a lot more traffic than most. I hypothesize (with some backup from referer stats) that this is because they address particular life questions or issues that are common and that visitors are coming directly from internet keyword search engines. For instance, a sermon titled 'What is Heaven?' has long gotten a lot of traffic. Likewise others, such as 'A Personal Relationship With Jesus as Lord and God,' 'Seeking God's Will,' and our 'What On Earth Am I Here For?' from our Purpose-Driven Life series have all shown higher traffic.

   On a promotional and webdesign note, It's probably important to make sure your sermons/teaching materials are well-linked from your homepage, so that people get used to seeing them and finding them without too much searching. Since it's hopefully a resource that you are adding-to regularly (weekly?), it should be a permanent fixture on the homepage and navigation menus. You might also have periodic mentions elsewhere and in church, in announcements, newsletters, etc to remind people that the resource is there. You and the pastor/teachers are investing time, prayer, effort and perhaps even money in this material, don't be shy about promoting its availability.

   Obviously putting teaching materials online isn't limited to sermons, and can extend to all sorts of teaching materials, from Bible study guides, conferences, sunday school classes, lectures, articles, and even children's sunday school materials. In our case, we've just begun extending beyond sermons but I'd encourage you to always be thinking of what else is taught at your church that might go up on your website. There may be someone out there looking for that answer right now.

   For more detail on actually posting, see our discussions of Sermon Transcripts vs. Audio Files., Creating Sermon/Teaching Audio Files and Creating Sermon Transcripts.

   Neat news: Central's website and our online sermons were discussed in a November 6th, 2003 Baltimore Sunpaper article, "Churches reach out with online services" in the Plugged-In section. The article included good discussions with webmasters from several churches.

3. Bible Reading Calendars, Schedules & References
   Using the Bible Gateway, it's very easy to post reading schedules with links to read the scripture online. Lots of sites do this kind of thing. It's also handy to link scripture references on your site (from sermons, preaching schedules, studies, etc) directly to the Bible verse lookup. Users can look up the scripture, see it in different translations, read more of the context, etc. Linking is easy.

   Church site webmasters can include daily readings and scripture for other purposes in their own sites using a variety of services. Here are a few, though I'm sure a search would find many more.

   • The Bible Gateway offers a search interface, and verses included in your site by RSS, web service, etc.
   • Crossway Bibles: ESV (English Standard Version) Bible Online, details how to use the ESV as a web service, via javascript, RSS or opensearch syndication, etc
   • Example: Bible Reading Plan (One Year Tract) by Toongabbie Anglican Church, using the ESV service

4. Job Opportunities Section/page
   We've found the web to be an incredible help in recruiting, especially pastors and program staff where there is an extended search process. We keep paid print/magazine ads short but include our URL for further details. We then put longer info on the website. Potential candidates can check us out fully and learn great detail about the position without us having to post large (expensive!) ads. Also, prospective applicants can learn about us before committing to an application or even a more personal contact. This is more useful for larger churches who are presumably doing more frequent hiring, but can work for any size church.

5. Youth/Student Ministries Section
   As discussed above, your website can help build your youth as a community. With a strong youth ministry section, your youth can have a way to not only keep up with what's going on, but to communicate with you and with each other during the week.

   Disclaimer: our student ministry section doesn't meet all of the goals of this discussion yet, but we're working with our new student ministries director to redesign the whole section. We'll see what works as we go and update this. If anyone has experience in this area or suggestions, please feel free to write.

   1. Photos: Our youth love seeing photos of themselves and of their friends, far more than most adults do. This definitely extends to seeing shots of them and of youth events on the website. Add photos throughout the site and in photo album sections where you put a set from a particular event. Rotate out old ones if you are short on disk space as you add new ones. Keep them current too. Youth group members graduate and move on. Having great photos of kids who haven't been in group for 2 years isn't very effective.

   2. Getting the youth involved in the website design and maintenance: This is something that many church webmasters would love, but it can be fairly difficult to do. The youth section will be used and useful to the youth far more if they have a say in it. Also, youth ministries can be very active, so just keeping up with current events can be a challenge for a webmaster without help from the youth ministry staff. Getting active youth help probably depends most upon the particular interests of your youth, whether your youth ministry staff & volunteers are willing and interested in helping, and in how much contact your website people have with the youth. Admittedly we've had limited success in this so far, even though our kids are very active online. Suggestions welcomed...

   3. Writing Style & Tone: We've recommended an informal and friendly writing style for the entire website, but this goes double for the youth section. If you write too stiffly, it'll turn youth away, even from a very active and friendly ministry. You will probably want to have help from your youth ministry staff and volunteers with the content and don't be offended if they rewrite large sections that you've written. (BTW, this does not mean trying to use too much slang or trying to talk like the youth. That's a pitfall you want to avoid. Just be friendly, fun, and slightly weird)

   4. Be willing to have a different design for the youth section than the rest of your website. Usually websites maintain a consistent style or 'look' throughout that meets good design rules in a number of ways (which we won't discuss now)... Youth sections though are often more effective if you treat it almost as a separate website with its own look, design and structure. It'll still be linked back and forth with the rest of the church website, but not designed by the same criteria. You'll see this on many church websites... and ours will be going that way sometime soon.

   5. Communication via Forums and Chat Rooms
      Many of your youth are probably very active online, via email, instant messaging and forums or chat rooms. Many are doing much of their communication with friends not over the phone as much as over email or IM'ing. Our church in particular has youth from many different schools so they don't see each other much outside of youth group. Giving them a safe, common place to talk where they're also comfortable discussing spirtual or personal matters should reinforce their friendships during the week.

      We're considering adding some moderated forums and possibly moderated chat room space to give our youth this opportunity. Our youth director or volunteers can then have discussions with anyone who shows up online. The tendency of online communications to lower barriers and inhibitions can help people share or ask sensitive questions more easily.

      • Forums vs Chat Rooms: To us, a forum is generally implemented as a place where you post messages that stay there (for a while) and other reply by posting their own messages. This is generally thread discussions like usenet or any of the thousands of forums around. Anyway can see the messages posted and follow discussions by visiting the website/forum. Messages may be removed either by moderators or when they reach a particular age.

        Chat rooms are far more fluid and temporary. They are spaces that allow a number of people to log in and type short (generally) messages back and forth to one another. The discussions are not generally saved or viewable later, except perhaps in a logfile by an administrator.

      • Moderation: Online this term means having a moderator, or person in charge of discussion areas. In forums or chat rooms, moderators have administrative controls that let them remove postings or even kick out people who aren't behaving appropriately. We feel that it's important to have an adult with oversight and moderation control available if we put forums or chat rooms online. Not only can a moderator help keep discussions civil, but they can help protect against the risk of the space attracting pedophiles or other dangers to our youth. We'll probably have a chat room that is 'open' during certain times only when a moderator is present.

      • Technical Details: You can either install a script or application software on your webserver or you can use a chat room or forum that is hosted elsewhere. These remotely hosted forums and chats can be very powerful and configurable and are often free. You link between it and your website of course, but you don't have to pay your webhost for scripting capabilities. Something to consider. To get started looking into forums, see The Online Community Report, Conferencing Software for the Web and Forum & Message Board Hosting Services. FindApps: Web-based Apps (WebApps) & Application Service Providers is a directory of hosted applications of all kinds that would also be a good resource.

   6. Privacy & protection of information about your youth should be a concern for you in your whole website design. Many public school systems don't even allow any student names to be mentioned on websites. We have a privacy policy that addresses not what info we get from visitors (very little) as much as how we treat information about our members. Youth are treated most carefully in this respect. Unfortunately, privacy and safety on the internet is a real issue, especially for minors, and we must treat it responsibly.

General Design Guidelines and Philosophies

This section just spells out a few design guidelines we decided upon early in our development. They could probably use a little update, but are generally what we still follow. Take them or leave them, but they might offer you some food for thought as you decide upon your own design.

• Keep It Simple: CPC's website is a church site and global readability is much more important than having the latest glitz. Generally this means using the simpler ways to construct pages, rather than trying to use a lot of images and the latest web thing, whether it be JavaScript, Java, or something else. We are communicating about a church community, not trying to show off our technical coding skills. This doesn't mean that we have to avoid all useful new tech, just choose things by their usefulness, not their coolness. It also means choosing things that many different browsers can see and use.

• Global Readability: Our intent is to communicate to as broad an audience as possible. Thus, we have chosen to avoid most of the browser-specific implementations of things. It also means using simple design that, while it may not be as pretty, will still be readable and usable in older or more limited browsers (including Lynx). Where newer technologies like CSS are used, make sure it degrades gracefully in older browsers.
  • Use standard HTML
    (and not the most recent, bleeding edge HTML/CSS/etc that is poorly supported in the versions of browsers being most used at the time)
  • Use images to enhance, not as a necessity
  • Use fairly simple layout (harder to break and renders faster)
  • Test without images

• Graceful Degradation: When techniques or technologies are used that might not be supported on all browsers or for all visitors, design in such a way that lack of support won't cause serious problems. This is especially true when using java, javascript, frames, plug-ins or CSS where browser support varies widely. This will require actual testing in a variety of browsers.

• Image Use: We choose to use images to enhance our site and to add character and beauty. We avoid using them in a way in which they are necessary. In other words, the site is still perfectly usable and it still communicates virtually the complete message even if no images are loaded. This welcomes people using browsers which are older, image-challenged, or even for the blind. It also considers that most people access the net via modems and lets them surf without the speed penalty of image loading.

  Update: we've been carefully adding more photos throughout the site to help it to be more friendly and to better get across the idea that there are real, living, friendly people behind all the text. Photos can be small, but still useful and attractive.

• Keep It Small: As mentioned above, we design to keep loading small to welcome visitors using slow connections. There will be a few limited areas which are inherently larger, such as photo album areas, but these will be enhancements of our site, and users can choose to go into those slower-loading areas.

• Keep it Consistent: Consistency in look, navigation, graphics and layout will not only build a "site identity" but also help users to navigate and use a site.

• Exceptions: Any set of rules needs exceptions. We choose to use some slightly non-spec HTML for certain things. These are only for enhancement and should not cause problems where they are not supported. The decision to use them is made carefully. One example is the use of the BGCOLOR attribute within tables. At the time, HTML 3.2 was the currently-supported spec and did not include this, but it was used very widely and many standard 3.2 compliant browsers do support it. Another is use of percentage widths for table cells. Again, non-spec, but widely supported.

Development Detail Questions

Questions related to the actual website, it's development, tools, techniques, etc

1. Duties of a Church Webmaster

   Question: What you do as webmaster or administrator of church web site. What are the duties of a church webmaster, or just general webmaster. I want to get an idea of what is expected of me as webmaster (since I am new to this).

   ok. The job varies by company, church, website, whatever, but, off the top of my head, here are some of the basics you'll probably encounter. Keep in mind that it's easier if you have a small team to maintain the website, so you can share tasks.

   • Work with staff, other church members, and your web team to decide what features and info will be on the site
   • Work with staff or other at your church to collect the needed information and written content (also images, photos, logos, etc) that you'll need. (and to work out how to get regular updates)
   • Research what webhost to use, what features, etc.
   • Select a domain name and get it registered (your webhost may take care of the registration details)
   • Work out your initial design for the site layout and page layouts (with team and others)
   • Prepare images, logos, photos, other non-html content, etc.
   • Set up any dynamic features such as search engines, guestbooks, forums, calendars, login-protected areas, database-driven areas, etc.
   • Set up email accounts for staff under the new domain. (may be done by either your webhost or another support person)
   • Create the pages of the website, link in and upload to the webhost.
   • Create sermon/teaching audio files and/or transcripts. (a good task to delegate)
   • Periodically check the site (links, content updates, etc)
   • Check in on any dynamic features or community features such as guestbooks or forums. (forum or mailing list admin may become a task for a dedicated moderator)
   • Renew your domain registration as necessary.
   • Do some promotion and link-requesting to get your websites listed in search engines and on other related sites.
   • Recruit and train volunteers and your eventual replacement.

   Generally you'll be responsible for the site. Making sure the webhost is set up and working ok, updating content, checking links, keeping up with things going on at church where you may need to add or update content. This may also mean recruiting and managing a team.

2. What web development software do you use?

   The main tools we use are:	Cost
   HomeSite for HTML editing	$100 USD for v5.5
   PaintShopPro for most graphics work	$75-110 USD for v9
   CSE HTML Validator	$129 USD or free lite version
   TopStyle for CSS & XHTML editing	$80 USD
   GoldWave Digital Audio Editor for audio files	$42 USD
   WS_FTP for uploading files	$45 USD for Pro LE version is free for some
   Xenu's Link Sleuth for link checking.	free
   Analog for WWW logfile analysis	free

   Prices are just to give you a guideline and are as of 10/2003. You may also find older versions, bundle deals or discounts. There are shareware or free evaluation versions available of many good tools including HomeSite, PSP, GoldWave, WS_FTP and TopStyle. There are also other free or open source tools out there if you look. We have some more info and links at Wilk4: Web Design Resources.

3. Where do you get all the cool images on your site?

   We've gotten things all over, and have created some ourselves. However, for graphics and clipart, we really have to recommend ChurchArtPro, a subscription church clipart service. They have long been a provider for clipart for print use, but have been branching into web clipart as well. If your church office already subscribes to their service, you can search and download from the website. They do some of the nicest artwork we've seen anywhere and have a searchable website with an enormous archive of their clipart. Most if it is available in fairly high resolution tif or wmf formats which you have to resize and sometimes color for your use. (not a big deal using PaintShopPro or something similar)

   Note that we're willing to share many of the images we use, though you need to ask first. We can then guide you to an image index. (Sorry, but we can't share the ones from ChurchArtPro.)

   Likewise, don't just grab (ie "steal") images from other sites without asking. It's not only wrong, rude and disrespectful of someone else's work, but it shows a poor moral witness... especially when you get caught.

   If you need photos for images, I'd strongly recommend IStockPhoto, an archive of tens of thousands of user-contributed stock photos that are very inexpensive (currently 50 cents each) to download and royalty free. You can even contribute your own and get download credits, as I have. (If you are using photos of people, it's nicer to use photos taken around your church, rather than stock photos. You gain in sincerity what you may lose in relative quality)

4. Can we copy your ____ page for our site?

   Please see our Copyright Notice page. Generally we'll let others borrow certain things, and will even help you use them, but you need to contact us and ask first. This also goes for our graphics and page layouts.

5. How often do you update your site?

   We generally update it once or twice a week, depending upon what updates or new content come out of the office or members. We want it to be current, and worth coming back to frequently, not just for a one-time visit. See our What's New! to get an idea of our updates or check the dates on the bottom of every page.

   I recently spoke with a couple that came to our church mainly as a result of the web research they did into churches in our area. One of the factors that they both mentioned was that the church websites that were more obviously active (frequently updated) gave an impression of churches that were more active. This also worked in reverse, in that church sites that hadn't been updated in a long time gave the impression of churches that either didn't care about their sites or that weren't as active. Admittedly, there is probably no real correlation between the update rate of your site and the liveliness of your church, but visitors may still connect the two, either consciously or unconsciously.

   This is just something to think about as you maintain your site. Stale or seldom-updated sites can give a poor impression even if they are otherwise well-designed and attractive. Likewise, other factors besides than the actual content can make positive or negative impressions that are connect to your church or ministry. These secondary factors can include overall site quality, ease of navigation, attractiveness, colors, broken links, etc. Don't let this scare you off, users are forgiving. Just try to keep your site looking active and be as careful as you can.

6. How much space do you need for a website?

   In general, websites don't take much disk space. Our site at one point had almost 400 pages and takes about 10.5 MB, of which about 4MB was photo images. (Outdated: This was several years ago and was before adding sermon MP3's, but it gives you an idea of how much you can do in a little space)

   Keep in mind that our site has many more webpages than most other church websites, though we do work carefully to keep file sizes low. Most churches can start up with only a few megabytes of server space with no problems.

   Note that adding things like photo images, video, or audio files will increase your space needs much more than html files will. Most html files are under 20k, often under 5k. If you serve RealAudio or MP3's of sermons, you might look at a separate host for the audio files. There are many hosts that specialize in that and provide audio and video streaming as well as the additional disk space.

   If you need an estimate for audio files, we are using 22kbit, 16 or 18 kbps, mono MP3 files for our sermons. They are generally between 2.5MB and 5MB each, with most around 3.5MB. Our sermon length is generally in the 15-20 minute range.

7. What are startup costs like for a church website?

   Costs are quite reasonable. We went with a small local ISP (Columbia Connextion) for dial-up access and hosting. That was about $15/month though it went up a bit when we upgraded to virtual hosting to support a domain name. Software was inexpensive. We use HomeSite for an HTML editor and PaintShopPro for graphics, both of which are under $100 each and are available in evaluation or shareware versions. Since we did the site ourselves we didn't have costs to hire a webdeveloper (yes, you too can learn html and web development Virginia, it's easy!) Domain name registration is now under $35/year, and well worth it.

   We do recommend that you check out your local ISPs for web access and/or hosting. They often provide great rates, flexibility and more personal service. We've been very happy with Columbia Connextion since we started with them in 1996. You can also get access from one company and go with a separate webhosting-only company for the site hosting. Hosting is a very competitive field in prices, features and service. Depending upon the features you need, you can generally get quite powerful hosting plans for $10-20/month.

   One other hosting option to mention is the church/ministry site hosting places like ForMinistry. These sites often offer free websites for churches or ministries, but have limits on the size, number of pages and features. They do usually have some simple tools or templates to help you get started. There are many different free church hosts with a variety of features and limitations. It's a decent option if you don't have someone who can do a lot (yet) or if you just want to put up a few pages of information. Look around christian search engines to find such companies.

   One last thing to add is that some church sites use content management systems (CMS), which generally let you update the content on your site easily via a browser interface. The information is presented in standard or customized page templates for a common look across the site. Many of these systems are excellent and even some free church/ministry sites offer them. See a list of some below in Template, CMS or Database-based Website Development Systems. These systems can vary from a site of just a few pages to a system that manages a large site with discussion forums, member areas, study resources and more.

   Don't let cost stop you from doing a website. If you have someone willing to take it on and learn, it can be done for lunch money. There are freeware and shareware tools out there and hosting is really cheap. Your whole year's web budget may be less than the cost of a couple of small newspaper print ads. (and the website may be far more effective)

   Warning: Be careful if you use free webhosts that make you have ads on your site. Not only does this make you look pretty cheap, but you might have little or no control over what type of ads get shown on your site. (This also goes for link and banner exchange networks). You'd presumably be really unhappy to have some porn site banners or ads across the top of your church website homepage. There are a lot of free or inexpensive christian webhosts. If you have to go with a free webhost, they are much safer to use.

   Warning: If you go with a custom web developer/designer your costs can be much higher. Before you do, check carefully to see if you have anyone in your church/ministry who is willing to learn or who already does web development and is willing to work on a site for you. Tell them I said it can be an enjoyable personal ministry. Really ;-)

8. Should I hire a custom webdeveloper to design our site?

   If you do go with a custom webdeveloper, talk to them a lot and make sure to see examples of their work, especially other church/ministry sites or sites topically related to what they'll be doing for you. Confirm with those site's owners that the webdeveloper did, in fact, do their site and see if they would recommend that developer. Ask if the developer designed the site that is currently up. (He/she could have designed an older version of the site that's no longer used) Unfortunately, as in any field, some developers lie or exaggerate in their claims, so you need to check references carefully.

   On the other hand, keep in mind that clients often change sites without the help of the original designer and screw it all up. Many developers despair about showing their work because they no longer control it and it has changed or gotten messed up.

   A good webdeveloper can help you to define your goals for the site, find and set up hosting, design the look, navigation, graphics, content, etc in a way that it would take you far longer to do, particularly if you have to learn as you go. He will still have to rely on you for a great deal of the content, so please (for me), be cooperative and don't leave him/her hanging ;-). Overall, hiring someone might be your best route, and may in fact be very cost-effective. That decision has to be up to you though.

   As far as finding a good webdeveloper, all I can tell you is to ask around. Ask other churches. Email the owners of sites you like, and check with your members. Some of them may either be web developers or be in positions where they have hired web developers for personal or business sites.

   Note/Disclaimer: Many custom webdevelopers are very professional and can help you a great deal. As a result of my years doing this site, I (jeff) design and maintain some other sites for hire, so I'm certainly not against custom developers. I just warn you to choose carefully.

9. What obstacles did you have to overcome?

   We've been lucky in that our webdev team has had few barriers or obstacles from within the church. Our ministry began when our associate pastor approached a few of us known 'computer geek' types about doing a church website. We discussed ideas, what we'd like to put up, things to do or avoid, etc. We got our initial site up and have been expanding, redesigning and maintaining it ever since.

   Our pastors, session and congregation have been supportive. Some churches have organizational, turf or authorization stuff to overcome, but CPC has a tradition of letting people 'jump in' to fill needs and run with it if they aren't screwing up too badly. See our recommendation regarding this area.

   Costs haven't been that much considering what they were getting for the cost. It was also helpful that we started small and grew naturally, thus the initial cost and work wasn't prohibitive. See the startup costs question above.

   If anything, we'd like more congregational participation in production of content, but that seems to be common to most church website ministries. The office does feed us material regularly and upon request.

   We could use more help, but then, we haven't done much active recruiting or asking yet either...

10. Team Development Tips

    Almost any website other than personal sites will involve a number of people who will either be directly involved in editing the site or at least involved in offering content or suggestions (or complaints). Working with them can involve some challenges. Here are a few tips that might help make things go a bit smoother.

    • Backups: Yeah, you know you should make backups of any computer work you do, but it's important with websites too. Not only do you have to worry about computer breakdowns, but also about servers being hacked, etc.
      
      • Don't rely on your webhost for backups. Files can get corrupted during transfer, on their drive, by hackers or viruses, or for a thousand reasons. They'll generally spell out in their agreements that they aren't responsible and that you should have your own backups.
      • For non-CMS sites, I suggest you work on your files locally (on your computer) and only upload after you've finished editing and testing them there. Then backup the site or the changed file to a ZIP disk or other removable media. Preferably keep dated backups so you can go back to an earlier version of a file if necessary. Website editors certainly let you edit your site directly using FTP, etc, but doing it locally will not only let you test on a non-public copy, but will help you have at least one backup.
      • Don't forget to backup ALL your files, including htm files, images, scripts, config files, PDFs, audio files, audio source files, webhost setup details, usernames & passwords, databases, etc. Try to think about what info and files you'd need if you were to set up the site from scratch on a new webhost or new server.

        If your sites uses an online content management system (CMS) or if some or all of the content is stored in databases, don't forget to periodically backup those databases, scripts, config files and templates offline too. It's easy to forget when you use a website interface for site changes that you don't have a copy of that data yet.
        
        Again, don't rely only on your webhost to maintain backups. (I just heard a true story from one church site CMS provider whose server got hacked and found he didn't have good/current backups. Reconstructing all the client sites was quite painful).

    • Change Synchronization: Be careful when multiple people are editing the same site that you don't mess each other up. You'll need some means to know who is going to be working on what. This doesn't have to be more complex than sending an email out at start and end of editing, but it can save real hassles. (ICQ or other instant messaging is handy for this too).

      If you have a larger site or team or need a more professional editing environment, consider using some kind of version and source control application like CVS, RCS or MS Visual SourceSafe. You can even set them up for remote access.

    • Development Index: We've found that it's handy to have a page that acts as an index with links to any pages that are in development. This page isn't linked into the site so only people with the URL will find it. It lets you put up pages you're working on and tell others who are involved where to look to offer comments.
    • Notification: Have some notification procedure set up to tell other team members or related individuals what changes you've made and when. This can be as simple as a short email when you upload files. It helps others know what changed so they can review as necessary and keeps the team aware of what's going on.
    • One over all: Depending upon the size of your site, you may need multiple people each responsible for editing different sections. It still helps to have one person 'in charge' overall or at least acting as coordinator, point of contact, and general policy maker. I know this conflicts with our Presbyterian way of doing everything by committee ;-), but it really helps coordinate things. Even a symphony needs a conductor. That person can still consult with other leadership for serious issues as needed.
    • Web Site Development for Religious Organizations has some useful discussion of how you might work to make sure your website ministry team is a team from the start, and not just one or two overloaded souls stuck with doing it all. See "Assess Your Resources" and "Maintain Your Website." (I can't write on that topic yet since I'm mostly in the 'one overloaded soul' mode ;-)

11. Sermon Transcripts vs. Audio Files

    Many other church sites post their sermons online in audio file formats, generally RealAudio (RA), Windows Media Format (WMF) or MP3. We've been posting ours as written transcripts since 1998 and are now posting both. There are advantages to either way.

    Audio formats are actually fairly easy to generate and post. You run a tape through a player tied to your sound card and the right software. You do a little editing and save in the format(s) you want, then upload and link it in. Audio formats do well for people who like to hear the speaker and to get a feel for them and for the message that way. These days, with so many portable MP3 players out there, listeners can easily download your sermons and burn them to a CD-R or an audio player to listen as they travel, exercise, etc. They don't have to sit at the computer to listen. There are also some things in the spoken word that do get lost in a transcript such as intonation, laughter, audience response, etc. Disadvantages are that audio files take up far more disk space and transfer bandwidth. You may need to pay your webhost/ISP more for the space, bandwidth and for audio streaming features. Also, people without a sound card or audio player are mostly out of luck.

    Transcripts are in some ways more difficult and costly to post since someone needs to transcribe the sermons from tape, then they need to be checked carefully. Once that's done, it's easy to copy into an HTML template file and post. Advantages include:

    • much smaller file sizes (20kB vs several MB)
    • can be read by anyone with a browser
    • can be printed off for later reading or markup and you don't have to sit there and listen all at once
    • can be translated relatively easily (though probably poorly) to other languages, using online text translators such as Babelfish, Google language tools, etc.
    • keyword searchable, from your site search or internet search engines
    • can have bolding, images, or other markup to emphasize things and can have links in the text to sermon note, images, other related pages or scripture lookups.

    So, in general, if you can only do one or the other, we prefer transcripts and feel that they are more accessible and useful to more people, but this decision will depend upon your needs and resources and upon what your congregation wants. Many people really do like to listen to the sermons online. If you can do both, go for it.

    For more about posting sermons or other teaching, see our discussion; Sermons/Teaching Section.

    Suggestion: A member recently made a great suggestion... you can gain the advantages of both formats without the disadvantages of either by posting the last few (4-10?) weeks worth of sermons in audio format, replacing them with transcript files when the transcripts are ready. You'd maintain this small, current running set in audio format, so that visitors could always find a few to listen to. This system has several advantages:

    • It provides a few current sermons for visitors who would like to hear your speakers.
    • Regular visitors who prefer audio format can listen to sermons by checking before they are gone from the recent sermons set.
    • You might actually get them online faster than the transcripts.
    • You wouldn't take as big a hit for disk space as you would if they were all in audio format.
    • You get the other advantages of transcripts, searchability, small file size, accessibility, etc.

    To get started, see our instructions below for creating audio files or transcripts and the resource links to Sermon Audio and Transcription Help.

    Yes, we're finally adding audio sermon files too. In 2002 we started a trial of audio sermons as MP3's. Comments or suggestions would be welcomed, especially if you have experience doing audio sermons yourself. So far our members really like them. Thanks! ~Jeff

    Neat news: Central's website and our online sermons were discussed in a November 6th, 2003 Baltimore Sunpaper article, "Churches reach out with online services" in the Plugged-In section. The article included good discussions with webmasters from several churches.

    2005 Update: with prices on webserver disk space and bandwith coming down, there is less of a cost hit for hosting audio files. Also, there are now some audio search engines that spider sites and link people right to your audio content. We've been getting increasing numbers of visitors from sites like SingingFish to our sermons. Lastly, the whole podcasting craze is making audio content of all sorts easier to find and use and far more popular. Many churches are adding RSS feeds for podcasting sermons and other teaching - even leading to the new buzzword 'Godcasting.'

12. Creating Sermon/Teaching Audio Files

    There are many ways to create sermon audio files, from direct CD recorders or MP3 encoders built into your sound system to capture during the service to more manual procedures like ours. This isn't so much a recommendation as a description of how we do them (so far).

    1. Our sound operators make 2 tapes of each service, one of the whole service for our tape ministry and one of just the sermon that we use. The 2nd tape makes sure we don't have a gap in the middle of the sermon if the tape switches sides then. (as the whole-service tape often does)
    2. If you have a guest speaker make sure you get their permission before posting either the transcript of audio file of their sermon.
    3. I play the tapes on a decent boombox player with the headphone output cabled into the line-in input of my PC's sound card.
    4. As it's playing, I record the input on the PC as a 22kbit, mono WAV file using an audio recording and editing program like SoundForge XP Studio (the inexpensive version of SoundForge).
    5. Once it's recorded I do some minor editing and quality work:
       1. Trim off any unwanted stuff at beginning and end.
       2. Sometimes edit out any particularly bad pops.
       3. Adjust the overal volume to a reasonable level, consistent with our other sermons.
       4. Sometimes run a narrow notch filter to remove ringing, since our sound system sometimes has a mild ring on one frequency. To do this, I have to open the WAV file up in the GoldWave digital audio editor since SoundForge XP Studio doesn't offer this feature.
       5. Sometimes run a noise reduction using the "light hiss" preset in Goldwave if necessary. This is generally only necessary if the operator didn't record the tape at a high enough level, though it is often nice to get rid of even slight hiss on good recordings. This filter seems to do a nice job of eliminating that without changing voice characteristics noticably.
       6. Sometimes the sound operator started the sermon-only tape a minute or two late, so I might need to grab that missing bit from the whole-service tape and paste it in.
       7. Remember to make sure that there is no sensitive missionary info in either the audio file or the transcript. It's easy to forget this, but critical. This may mean some minor editing and name changing or even not putting up a certain sermon at all. Check explictly with the missionary first if there is any doubt.
    6. After editing, save the file as a WAV file, named by date (YYYY_MMDD.WAV).
    7. Now, using either SoundForge XP Studio or Goldwave, save the file as an MP3 with the desired quality level.
    8. Check the MP3 file now to see if the quality is ok. I've found a few cases where the voice sounded very odd at 16kbps so I had to bump it to 18kbps or 20kbps.
    9. Now edit the MP3 file's information fields. I haven't found any MP3 ID tag editor yet that is really satisfactory, so I use a combination of MusicMatch and another one to get all the fields set as I want. At very least you want to put in copyright info, your website URL, title and the preacher/speaker. I also like to add some info about where to get transcripts and about the sermon details like scripture reference, theme and/or sermon series.
    10. Now copy the audio file up to your website using ftp.
    11. Set up the html pages needed in the sermon section to point to the new MP3 files... upload them.
    12. Remember to add an entry to your RSS/podcast feed file for each sermon, and to validate it.
    13. Related bits...
        1. Backup your edited .WAV and .MP3 files. (see recommendations below on this)
        2. If your church is also distributing CDs, you might be burning them now from your edited .WAV file, or passing that file to the folk who manage that.
        3. Once we're made our digital recordings, the whole-service tapes go to our tape ministry folk and are used and kept. The sermon-only tapes go back and can be re-used for other weeks.
    14. Done! With luck and practice this'll only take about an hour for each sermon.
        Often our sermon audio files can be online by the afternoon of the day they were preached.

    Some recommendations and details:

    • We keep the WAV files so that we can make a new MP3 from the higher-quality source if necessary, or in case we ever want to burn a CD of the sermons. Since the MP3's use such low quality levels, saving an editing higher-quality source is good practice. We re-use the sermon-only tapes after the transcription is done so the WAV backup may be the only quality copy saved.
    • Backup both the WAV and MP3 files so you won't lose them if your drive crashes. Give copies to your church office to store in some safe place as a long-term archival legacy. If you use CD-R's, pick a good quality of disk for better long-term storage. Check them before storing.
    • There are many audio recording and editing programs out there. Compare and pick your favorite. Our choices were by cost and the minimal features we needed. I like the interface of SoundForge XP Studio, but GoldWave is shareware and definitely offers better features in noise reduction and parametric filtering. Many others also recommend Syntrillium's Cool Edit.
    • When choosing a format, consider MP3. Many sites use RealAudio, which can be a pain for both creator and listeners and which doesn't have a lot of advantages over MP3. With MP3 player software and handheld MP3 players so common, using that as your format lets your listeners download the file, play it as they want, burn it to a CD or listen to it as they drive, jog, whatever. The credit for convincing me of this goes to the encoding and uploading instructions on SermonAudio.Com.
    • For the MP3 quality level, we generally use mono, 22kbit, 16 or 18 kbps. Some voices sound very odd unless I bump it to 18kbps or 20kbps. This is pretty low quality level since there is a tradeoff of quality vs file size. Users seem to think it's fine. I'd suggest when you start doing audio files that you test different quality settings to see what you prefer to use.
    • If you need a size estimate for audio files, at our level of 22kbit, 16 or 18kbps, mono, MP3, the files are generally between 2.5MB and 5MB each, with most around 3.5MB. Our sermon length is generally in the 15-20 minute range.
    • For hosting our MP3 files, it was a bit of an issue originally for us. We were adding them to our regular website, which only allows straight downloading, not streaming audio. Further, it was putting us way over our normal disk space limits, so we paid extra for that space. We'd considered putting them on another host but ended up serving them from our own server, which allows us all the disk space we want.

      If you are looking for hosting, a simple file host with MP3 streaming support and cheap, plentiful disk space would be enough. In fact, many of the current plans with webhosting companies are offering so much bandwidth and disk space so inexpensively (1-10GB) that this may not be an issue for most sites.

      FWIW, when I researched audio sermon hosting a few years back the best I found seemed to be SermonAudio.Com. They are relatively inexpensive, have a professional site, and keep all the sermon files, not just a rotating year's worth.

    • Be sure to set up an RSS file and post its URL to podcasting directories so that podcasters can easily find your sermons, and even download them automatically as you post new ones. (our feed) There is some good discussion and resource links on podcasting/Godcasting at Webservant.us - podcasting sermons?
    • Once we're made our digital recordings, the whole-service tapes go to our tape ministry folk and are used and kept. The sermon-only tapes go back and can be re-used for other weeks. We tape sermons for all 3 services even though we only post a recording from one/week. This is mostly so we can pick the best recording in case of sound system issues, whatever.
    • Other good resources are listed in the resource links section under Sermon Audio and Transcription Help.
    • For more about posting sermons or other teaching, see our discussions; Sermons/Teaching Section and Sermon Transcripts vs. Audio Files.

13. Creating Sermon Transcripts

    As with audio files, there are many ways to create transcripts. This is some info on how we do it. We've finally achieved a consistent and timely process that works well for us. YMMV.

    1. As mentioned in Creating Sermon/Teaching Audio Files, we have a tape of just the sermon from each service. After the audio file is made, we send the tape of the sermon we used for the MP3 out to a local transcription service. (make sure it's the same service tape as the MP3 or you'll drive your proof-reader crazy with the diffs ;-) (See if your transcriptionist can use your MP3s. If so it'll save some effort)
    2. If you have a guest speaker make sure you get their permission before posting either the transcript of audio file of their sermon.
    3. The service does the transcription and emails us the resulting MS Word file a few days later.
    4. At this point, one of our volunteer proof-readers goes over the file, comparing it to the MP3 and checking spelling, typos, names, bible-word spelling, etc. When that's complete, she emails the final doc file to me (the webmaster).
    5. Remember to make sure that there is no sensitive missionary info in either the audio file or the transcript. It's easy to forget this, but critical. This may mean some minor editing and name changing or even not putting up a certain sermon at all. Check explictly with the missionary first if there is any doubt.
    6. I copy the raw text from the Word file to an HTML template, do basic HTML formatting, adding paragraph breaks, adding links to scripture references, extra abstracts or sermon notes from the speaker, etc.
    7. Then the new file gets linked into the site and uploaded.
    8. Done! Depending upon everyone's time, this can get done in a week or less from the original sermon/teaching event.

    Some recommendations and details:

    • One thing that we found important: originally we had the pastors proof-reading the transcripts of their sermons after transcribing but they never really had time so we'd get months behind. That was a huge frustration for me and for them. Once we gave up on that and found a volunteer to do the proofing, it finally became regular and workable. So, don't count on your pastors for proof-reading if you can avoid it. They generally have better things to do and it'll make the webmaster's life far less frustrating.
    • We relied on volunteer members doing the transcriptions for the first couple of years, and, while we really appreciated that help (and frankly never would have started this without it!), it was pretty sporadic and slow. We eventually found it far quicker and less frustrating to pay for a professional transcription service. If the transcripts are a priority for you, it's probably worth considering the investment.
    • For your budgeting info, our costs for transcription are currently something like $30-35 USD each. I presume that'll vary depending upon length and where you can get your transcriptions done. We're using ForeverTyping. They do a good job and are local so they could just drop by the church for the tapes each week. Now we even skip the tape pickup step since they found they can do the transcriptions right from our MP3s on the website.
    • For more about posting sermons or other teaching, see our discussions; Sermons/Teaching Section and Sermon Transcripts vs. Audio Files.

    Question: Dan Patton of Mountain View Community Church recently asked me: "Have you ever considered using voice recognition software for making rough draft transcripts? I don't have any experience with it, but someone had recommended it to us as a possible alternative to a transcription service. I imagine it would require more cleanup from a proof-reader than the transcription service."
    We don't have any experience with it either, so if you do, please email me.

14. Do you use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?

    We've started to. CSS is a great idea, and the separation of content and visual design that it lets you do is quite powerful and desirable. But there are a number of very important browser support incompatibilities that can cause problems ranging from things not showing as you want... up to crashing your browser. That said, careful use, with lots of testing and research, is worthwhile. There are also techniques for hiding portions of CSS from particular (older/buggy) browsers. (another)

    Check out the TopStyle CSS Editor. It is excellent and has validators to tell you about problems with different browsers.

    As browsers mature and CSS support is improving, and as users are migrating to the new browser versions, we can rely more and more on CSS. We've been moving to use it more for presentation & styling, particularly where CSS failures are non-critical, but still doing layout with HTML tables. That will eventually change.

    When you use CSS, be sure to design and test for graceful degradation. This means that, if browsers don't support that feature or don't support it correctly, your page still mostly works. It may be less attractive, but it'll still be readable and usable. This generally relies on testing with different browsers.

    Warning: there are a lot of really neat things you can do with advanced CSS, and particularly in combination with javascript. Be aware that many of the advanced techniques either have serious browser incompatibilities or the rely on subtle hacks or tricks to try to work mostly the same in multiple browsers. Again, research and test before using anything too cutting-edge.

15. Do you use JavaScript or DHTML?

    In general, we've avoided client-side scripting like the plague. There have been too many inconsistencies between browser support to bother with it. Also, we had no compelling needs or functions that we needed it for, especially at the risk that it would work for some visitors and wouldn't for others.

    We don't want to completely warn developers off of using javascript, but remind you of the possible/probable browser incompatibilities and suggest that you test carefully with multiple browsers (mozilla, msie, netscape v7,v4,v3, opera....) and multiple browser versions. Don't use javascript in critical functions unless they have backup or graceful degradation for non-supporting browsers.

    Unfortunately, some blocks of users, like schools, companies, etc don't update browsers frequently, and users in other countries or using older computers may have older browsers since newer ones are too slow on them. Lastly, according to some webstats, even users with up-to-date browsers often turn off javascript. 11%! That's a lot if your site's navigation relies on it. In any case, the goal should be to design using web standards for forward compatibility and to design for broad accessibility.

    That said, we're starting to use it a few places for special, limited functions. See our Current Events: Calendar and 8:30 Worship Team Schedule. We wrote or heavily modified both scripts, so, if you'd like to use them, please ask us first. (besides, I have cleaner, generic copies to give you if you ask)

    I have had fairly good luck with the CoolMenus DHTML pulldown menu on other sites. (example) It is relatively easy to use, flexible, yet has good cross-browser compatibility. If you use it, or any DHTML navigation system though, be sure to provide alternate navigational links. I put an HTML link bar behind the menu. If the menu is disabled, then you see the HTML one. Graceful degradation saves the day!

16. About copywriting and protecting content...

    Question: We have a wonderful preacher here. We have an extremely large tape ministry and we also transcribe each sermon and format it into booklet form and give them away, but we want to put his sermons on the web. My question to you is about copywriting and protecting the content. How do you do that?

    Response: On copywriting and protecting the sermons, we actually do very little. It is rather difficult to really protect text content from being copied, and especially so when your main goal is to make it readily available. That's just a reality of how the web works. Anyone viewing it in a browser can save a copy or print it unless you go to major effort with special plugins to prevent it... and that defeats the goal of ease of use. Such mechanisms also make it harder for search engines to find and index the sermons. We want people to find them, print them out and spend time reading them or even passing them around.

    I suppose you could also set up a restricted area where users would need to login to see them. Then they would have to register or pay for access to that area. Again, to me, that defeats the major purpose of spreading good teaching of God's word to as many as possible.

    So, effectively, all we do is to post copyright notices at the bottom of each sermon and in the copyright info fields of audio files to note that it is copyrighted. That should be sufficient for legal coverage. You don't have to explicitly register the sermons or anything to have copyright legal coverage.

    And, any legitimate website who wants to post a copy of your content, particularly that labeled as copyrighted, would ask permission first, and would keep the copyright notes with the content.

    John Dowdell has some useful suggestions on protecting various kinds of content at his QOTW: How to protect digital content?. If you'd like to learn more about copyright protection see A brief intro to copyright, 10 Big Myths about copyright explained, and U.S. Copyright Office.

17. Do website awards mean much?

    Early on in the growth of the web, there was a phase where a great many people created awards and lists of websites they liked. This was a way to have a links list and a way to point to other websites you liked. More cynically, giving an award and link-back award gif to a site was also a way to get a link back to your site. Some of the awards were well researched and decided carefully, others were just "Joe Blow's Awards for Sites He Liked." That phase of the web's growth seems to be gone, and you'll find few active awards sites now, and most of those ignored.

    That said, we've gotten a couple, and have even posted an awards received page, though we hid it fairly well down. (humility/pride issues) Ultimately, we're glad that someone liked our site and the results of our hard work. It's nice feedback, but don't think a site is great just because they have some award gifs posted. We've seen some pretty bad sites plastered with dozens of the things.

    A review from someone like the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, where they compare your site to a detailed list of criteria, then tell you details of what they liked and what they thought you could improve, is far more useful as visitor feedback.

18. Registering a domain name

    We'd really recommend registering a domain name early on for your website. We didn't at first and had a real bit of work to re-register our new URL at all the search engines. It seems to be a lot quicker to get registered the first time than to make changes to a listing. Yahoo took about 8 months until they changed our listing there. Also, having your own name prevents you from being tied to a particular ISP/webhost. If you need to move, you can do it without having to notify the whole world of the changed address (URL). You just point the domain at the new webhost. Besides, isn't www.centralpc.org easier to remember than http://www.connext.net/~central/ ?

    We'd also recommend getting your email addresses set up under your domain name. It's easy and looks much more professional to have myname@centralpc.org than someschmuck@aol.com. If you can't get mailboxes under your domain, at least have the ISP set up email aliases to forward/redirect email to your 'real' email box.

    Warning: many adult site operators try to take over domains from other sites, including church sites. See my warning on this and be sure to keep your domain registration contact info current and get your renewal payments in early. Make sure any domain registrations use valid email addresses so you don't miss renewal notification emails. Renew early and put renewal dates on your calendar so you don't miss them if you don't get the emails. I know it sounds like I'm harping on this, but you have no idea how much of a pain it can be to lose control of your domain and have to switch or try to recover it.

19. What search engine do you use?

    We were using a free cgi/perl keyword search script from Extropia (used to be Selena Sol's Public Domain CGI Script Archive). It's great and easily customizable. Since it searches every page each time, it was getting a bit slow as our site grew.

    In 2000, we switched over to a remotely-hosted, indexed search engine by Atomz Search (now called WebSideStory). We highly recommend them. Try ours. Some notes:

    • Indexing means that it reads all the web files and builds an index, then searches against that index file, making for much faster and more powerful searching. Regenerating the index is on demand and/or weekly on a schedule.
    • Atomz search is remotely hosted, so you don't have to install or pay for scripts on your own server.
    • It's free for sites up to 750? pages.
    • Unlike most others, there are no banner ads, either on your search page or on the results pages, though they are adding Google Adwords ads into the results now (since 9/04). One warning: Note that currently you have no control over the types of ads served as you do at some services. I am pushing them to give us control since I have seen a few inappropriate things come up in results.
    • It has tremendous customizability and flexibility in how the results look and how searches are performed. You can build templates that make the results look like part of your site.
    • You can define Collections, areas to limit the search to.
    • Multiple ways to control the indexing and ranking, obeys robots.txt, uses META tags, set includes or excludes via the interface, etc.
    • You can see reports on the queries being used by visitors and on the indexing, including exactly what it found and indexed. (it actually does a link test as it indexes, so it'll report broken links between pages in your site that it finds)
    • You can set up multiple websites under one login account.
    • Highly recommended (and used by) some large sites like WebMonkey and O'Reilly

    If neither of these suit your needs, I'd suggest looking at the following sites:

    • Search Tools for Web Sites, Intranets and Portals, a directory of many available website search tools with reviews, examples, news and a guide to help you select a search tool.
    • FindApps.com - The Application Rental Guide, a new? directory of hosted applications of all kinds.
    • Google SiteSearch, use Google for searching within your site. Free, customizable and easy to set up, but does include AdWords ads.

20. Do you use a digital camera for your photos or are they scanned?

    For a while we preferred to use a regular camera and a scanner, then edit in PSP. Admittedly, this was because the only digital cameras we'd had access to had fairly poor quality, especially when compared to a normal scanned photo. Scanning let us get a better resolution and quality at that time, which we could then edit as needed. My new 8MP DSLR is a whole different story.

    Since digital cameras have increased in quality and decreased in cost so quickly we've seen the light and have learned the joy and love of them. ;-) The convenience of verifying shots on your camera's LCD as you take them, the ability to take as many photos as you want without the cost and time of developing them all, then the ease of uploading makes photo sharing so much easier that we can do much more than time allowed with scanning.

    If you have to buy a scanner, consider the nice models that offer a full-size flatbed scanner but with a photo feeder on the lid. I have an HP Scanjet 5530 that lets you scan a whole pack of 4x6 (or smaller) photos relatively quickly and easily. You can also scan negatives or slides if needed. Warning: I'm not impressed with how it handles matte-finish prints. They often have speckles that I never got with other scanners.

21. How do you do photo galleries or photo sharing spaces?

    At this point we've begun using a hosted photo gallery / photo sharing space web application to make the admin easier and to let others in the staff upload and manage photos. There are a lot of these photo gallery/share services out there, some free (with ads) but we've found Smugmug to be very good so far. Take a look!

    • Centralpc.smugmug.com

    One of the neat things this allows is for others to post photos and caption them. After initial setup and a little training, there is no need for a webmaster's time or skills or for any HTML editing knowledge or access. A youth ministries person can come back from a trip and post a whole gallery of photos immediately... without our help!. Very cool.

    Of course you can also put the photos directly on your regular website either manually or using gallery webserver software to upload, manage, and provide the views. At this point, webmaster time limitations pushed us to use a hosted webapp. The 20-minute setup to full functionality and their beautiful template choices and advanced functionality were just too tempting to resist vs evaluating, learning, installing and customizing software on our server.

    We will provide more discussion and resource links as time and experience allows. Meanwhile, here are some to explore.

    • Online photo galleries and sharing services
    • Online photo gallery software

    9/2006 Update: We'd been using a paid standard account at smugmug for about 8 months when I came across a page there offering free accounts to non-profits. Upon checking into it and just for asking, Smugmug not only gave us a free account, but upgraded it to their full Pro account. Throughout, their people have been unfailingly polite, agreeable and helpful, in ways that are astounding to those of us normally used to the "less-helpful" (cough) ways of support folk in so many other companies. In any case, all of our experiences with Smugmug so far, from their people, their generousity, their features and site designs and their technical prowess leads us to recommend them very highly.

    If you start doing photo galleries, or even individual photos within your site, don't forget to follow your member information privacy policy, being careful of such things as posting photos of children with their names. Presumably you would also be careful to be respectful of others' feelings, not posting photos that might be embarrassing or hurtful. What rules you set yourself are up to your team and your congregation, but read our guidelines and think about it before you get too far in.

22. How do you create your newsletter? Is it done in HTML or is it converted from another document. Our newsletter is currently only printed (using Pagemaker or Publisher).

    Our office does the main (printed, mailed out) newsletters in MS Publisher, but we do the web copies by hand in html using Homesite. The office sends us the text contents and any clipart originals we want, then we do the webpage(s) by hand. They don't look exactly like the printed versions, and the layouts and clipart are designed more for the web.

    Admittedly our layouts have been evolving over time from a straight inline layout to more of a columnar, multi-page, page-based layout, then to posting individual articles. It'll probably continue to evolve as we experiment with what works best and what is easy to read and navigate for the most people. (and as the office changes what they publish!)

    We'd also admit that our rather long format of putting the whole newsletter on one page may not be the most effective for easy of reading. It does allow a visitor to print the whole thing though and it suits the trade-off between maintainability and easy of use. Doing a number of newsletters all as a set of separate pages can be a real pain to create and maintain unless you have some good publication tools or a good CMS.

    What you do may also depend upon the publication frequency. For us it was certainly easier to post multiple articles when the newsletter came out once a month. Now that we have a 6-8 page News & Views every week it can be a lot more challenging to keep up, even if you aren't posting all of it.

    Some churches just convert their newsletters directly to Adobe PDF files, which are attractive and fairly easy to post. That works pretty well (though usability and linking from the newsletter to other parts of the site is less effective) if most or all of the newsletter is public info that you can post without too much editing.

    Before posting, be careful to take out any private/personal information that doesn't meet your info privacy policy, particularly any that involves or jeopardizes the safety of missionaries. Don't trust to putting it in a 'members-only' protected area, since they can be hacked or someone can get access by pretending to be a member.

    Other churches send newsletters out to members via email, either plain text or as attractive HTML emails. They can then either send the whole newsletter or send a version that has article abstracts/leaders and links back to the site for the full articles. We don't do that yet and have had limited success with our email list efforts so far in other areas, but many churches do it very well. Our pastor is interested in going this way so if you have recommendations on church email list publication, please email me.

23. How to you promote your website or get links to it?

    The first thing to remember is that if you don't ask for links and submit your site to search engines, no one will find your site. We don't spend a lot of time (now) or any money on promotion, but we have done a number of things that have gotten links to our site. We spent a lot more time on submissions when we first created our site.

    • Get a domain name first. Registering your own domain name makes it far easier to remember and to post in print publications. Also easier to change if you switch webhosts. Do this before submitting your site to others. It's far easier to do submissions once than to have to change it later. Save yourself a lot of work and hassle.

    • Read up on general website promotion Do's and Don't a bit before going off to get links. You'll want to make sure you include good titles, keywords, etc and not do any of the No-No's that might get you labeled as a search-engine spammer before you start submitting. Read up at reliable sites like Dave Child's articles, SelfPromotion.Com, SearchEngines.Com, etc to learn how to set up your site to make search engines reasonably happy.

      Warning: There are many "search engine optimizers" (SEO) or submissions and promotions people out there offering to submit your site to "hundreds" of search engines for a small charge. Some are legit, but many are scamming you. You can do most of what you need to yourself just as well. One good discussion of SEO dangers is this by Google.

    • Submit your site to the major general search engines. All of them will have links such as "Add a site", Add URL", etc. Most are free. Submit early, then check back in a few weeks to see if you've been listed. If not, resubmit. Don't go nuts and resubmit every day or they might consider you SPAM and ignore you. Submit-All sites may be ok, particularly something like SelfPromotion.Com, though you may do better to do a few of the major ones yourself by hand. You'll find the most appropriate categories that way. Some of the major sites to hit first would include: (yahoo, google, open directory, excite, altavista, raging, aol search, go.com, northern light, starting point, webcrawler, about.com...) Here's a list of major search engines and their submission pages.

    • Submit your site to regional and community sites. There are generally other websites in your local community that you can ask for links. It may help if you have a community resource links page yourself so you can offer to link back to such sites when appropriate. (that page is also pretty heavily trafficed on our site, so our users must find it useful) Regional sites will include city guides, libraries, regional link lists, local events calendars, state resource listings, even other local churches. Be very polite in requesting links. Others are not obligated to add every link that is requested. They are doing you a favor if they do, even if you offer to exchange