by Richard White, rc.white@snet.net
I'm Richard White, and I've just joined the list. I'm currently putting up a web site for Ridgebury Congregational Church in Ridgefield. I have been a programmer for many years and have some experience in HTML and web design. I've corresponded with Alan at Wilton Congregational (Abwiss@aol.com) with my thoughts on his site, and as some of the issues we discussed were fairly common, I thought I'd reproduce them here in my first post. I apologize if some of these concepts seem basic or obvious to anyone, or if they've already been discussed before I arrived.
1) Make all your pages the same width, preferably no wider than 610-620 pixels of screen resolution. This refers back to the discussion between Barbara Heaney and Anne Judge (Hi, Anne!) Every page you put on your site must look good at 640x480 resolution, (still the standard.) It's a funny thing, but while most people don't mind using a vertical scroll bar, they really *don't* like to see a horizontal scroll bar--it puts people off tremendously. Do whatever you can to avoid seeing the scroll bar at the bottom of your screen. Sometimes you have to get creative to achieve this, but it really pays off in readability for the viewer.
2) Try to standardize your visual design. Develop a visual theme for the site, some family resemblance from page to page. You don't need a specially designed ($$$) logo for your site; you can develop your own page heading (see point #3). But use it consistently throughout your site. Decide what your background color or pattern to use and use it everywhere. A plain white background is almost always the best choice, and certainly for a church. Pick a font face, size and style (bold, underline, etc.) for your basic text, section headlines and page titles. Use the same styles consistently throughout your site. This will make your information much easier to digest quickly. "www.saugatuckchurch.org" is a good church site; not flashy, but visually consistent.
I can't stress this enough; standardize, standardize, standardize!
3) May I recommend a *wonderful* book on designing web pages called The Non-Designer's Web Book by Robin Williams and John Tolland, paper, $29.95 from Peachpit Press. Four stars! It covers design and technical issues in very non-technical language, and I guarantee you will learn a great deal in a very short time, especially about how to acquire graphics, when to use them and how to prepare them for web viewing *and* ensure smallest size and quickest download times. (For you lucky newsletter producers, Ms. Williams also wrote The Non-Designer's Design Book about basic graphic design. Also a great book, recommended to me by my sister-in-law, an artist and designer/creator of art books.) Any large bookstore should have them both.
4) My personal opinion is that it's always better to rent space on a commercial web server and secure your own domain name ($70 for two years, renewable.) Using "home" pages on AOL, SNET or Compuserve, etc., is distracting and confusing, IMO. You will get faster download times for your viewers, and generally faster responce to support questions, AND your site will have a unique domain name like "www.mychurch.org" so it'll look like you're in the big leagues. It's easy and pretty cheap. I'm using "5dollarhosting.com" (Rochester, NY) which charges no monthly fee, just $1 per megabyte of storage used, per month. And they offer a 10% nonprofit discount. Do your own search for server sites at "www.tophosts.com". It's a website to help you locate commercial website server space providers according to criteria you enter.
5) Alan asked me about content. How do I generate new, ever-changing content to keep people coming back? While technical aspects are simple for me as a programmer, content issues loom just as large in my mind as they do in yours. Certainly the monthly stuff like calendars, upcoming events, and your church members' (or ministers') achievements and newsworthy activities will always be changing. The trick is to be aware of everything going on in *all* areas of your church's life. Keep checking with the ministers, committees, Christian Ed, your musical groups, etc. Find out what's new that they're doing, and then put it up on the site quickly. Sometimes this is as simple as redesigning the visual interface of your site, even if you don't really change content. One thing I'm focusing on is how to make the new content jump out from the home page. For instance, you see a lot of "What's New" sections, with links to the changed content deeper in the site. Another good trick is to have a clearly posted "This site updated every third Saturday" (for example) notice. Beyond these suggestions, I freely admit I'm wrestling with the same alligator. I could use some help here, too.
6) In deciding on content, cast a *wide* net. I've heard it said that you must know exactly who your audience is before you design your site. I disagree completely with that; my ambition is to have a little something for everyone. We do not need to have a narrow focus; quite the reverse. We aren't businesses who need to target a specific business or group of individuals as our prospective clients. Our target audience is everybody on Earth, right? Yeah, okay, we're designing sites for publishing information to our church members, but that's not the only reason we do this. Put in your church's history, for example, maybe a brief history of your town. Don't forget a map of how to find your church, with clear instructions. Link to your local town sites, to your local area church websites, especially non-UCC churches. Ask them to add a link to yours. Email Eric Anderson for the graphic and link to FIDO* and put it on.
You can also use your site for outreach to prospective members, even for fundraising and/or pledging. (Check with prospective webiste servers whether they offer "shopping cart" and credit card processing features. Why couldn't a church accept a VISA payment for Sunday flowers or Fellowship Walk bricks or even for member pledges? It's not very difficult to implement. We're certainly looking at that for Phase II.)
7) Buy, beg or borrow the use of a scanner to scan in pictures of your church, your staff and your people, or whatever other graphics you want to use. A scanner is simply an invaluable tool, and the basic Hewlett-Packard model no. 3200 sells for under $100 in the catalogs these days. Personally, I think HP is the best for the money, but there are plenty of other manufacturers. With a scanner, your choices of content for your website increase dramatically.
8) Finally, try to obtain and use a dedicated web page design program, like Macromedia's Dreamweaver (my fave) or Microsoft (hiss) Front Page. Using a word processor which claims it can "convert" documents to HTML is okay, but they are generally poor substitutes; they all generate ponderous amounts of extraneous code in your pages which can slow your download times to no good purpose.
9) I almost forgot: KEYWORDS! These are words and phrases which are embedded in the header of your home page which the big search engines use to classify your site. Once you've got them into your HTML and up on your server, contact all the search engines you can identify and request that they "register" your site. This means that they will survey your site and add all your keywords to their immense databases. Then, when someone types in a search word which matches a keyword on your home page, your web site will pop out.
Okay, that's enough for now. If anyone made it this far, I hope this helps in some way. If anyone has questions, put them up here on the list, and I'd be glad to throw in my two cents' worth. And please post your own ideas on content; even programmers get stumped by that one.
