I have not been posting a lot over the past couple of months. One resource which I should have mentioned earlier is the new Church Site Design Checklist from the Internet Evangelism Day website.

Your church website has enormous potential as part of your outreach strategy to reach into your community. However, not all churches understand how to design a site that will do this effectively. This self-assessment questionnaire can help you assess your site, and find new ideas or areas that could perhaps be modified.

When I first learned about the checklist, I worked through the questions with a particular church website in mind — a website I had developed a couple of years ago which was not as outreach-oriented as I would have liked to see it. I was pleased to see that the checklist seemed to rate the website just about where I would put it on a scale between being not outreach-oriented at all and being very outreach-oriented. Obviously, my opinion is not the final word on whether or not a church website is effective in terms of outreach to unbelievers, but it was good to see that the checklist seems like it will be helpful to churches.

Blake Atwood recently wrote an interesting article for BetaChurch.org about a new website he launched a few days ago. It’s a city portal designed to allow the church to, in Blake’s words, “enter into the conversation of the city around it.”

I’d encourage you to not only read the entire article but to also visit IFoundGeorgetown to get a flavor of Blake’s new project.

I just noticed that it’s been a month since I last posted to the blog. It seems like it’s only been a few days. That’s probably because I’ve been very busy with a couple of other major projects and also because I’ve been spending a lot of time in the back end system of the blog battling trackback spam. I think I have that sorted out, at least for the moment!

In the meantime, I found this article on Gadgetopia to be very relevant for churches. The article talks about what a content management system won’t do.

The trend we’ve seen over the past couple of years in which churches have moved to sophisticated content management systems to manage their websites is a very good and important trend as it addresses one of the major flaws in most church websites - the ability to easily add up-to-date content while minimizing bottlenecks in the flow of information.

However the article at Gadgetopia correctly cautions us that the use of a content management system does not mean that our content will be written, formatted, edited, organized, or approved for us. Churches still need talented copywriters to create effective websites.

For churches that do some form of pay-per-click advertising (on Google or Yahoo, for example), I wonder if you have some mechanism of tracking response in terms of people who attend one or more services as a result of seeing one of your PPC ads.

If you currently are engaged in a pay-per-click program, I would be very interested in knowing if you have devised a method to track response. Feel free to use comments to respond.

I have a question for church webmasters.

Does your church website have a private area just for members, and if so, what do you do when someone stops attending your church? Do you revoke their access? Do you let them continue to access the private areas of the site? Does it depend on their reasons for no longer attending (I can imagine that if a person moves out of the area, it might be treated differently than if someone left the church because of a moral failure, an intense disagreement with leadership, etc.).

Please leave your answers in the comments section. I’m very interested in learning about the different approaches to this issue.

Think Christian, which is well worth adding to your list of regular blogs to read, is talking about whether or not a Christian blog should have a gospel presentation.

So I’m curious what you think about this. Does your blog have a Gospel presentation, and why or why not? Does it seem strange to you that a Christian blog wouldn’t have a link to a Gospel presentation? And lastly, can you suggest any online Gospel presentations that might serve as a good model for such a thing?

Not surprisingly, most of those who have commented are in favor of including a gospel presentation. Perhaps just as not surprising (is that good grammar? — it doesn’t sound right), I’m going to suggest a different perspective.

An article in the current issue of BtoB Magazine called Let’s face it - faces sell caught my eye this morning. Here’s an excerpt:

They are visual magnets that readers, visitors and viewers simply can’t resist because people are enormously curious about their fellow human beings. Faces have a place in b-to-b advertising, despite its reputation for being cold and clinical. In fact, a human presence in b-to-b ads may be even more critical than in consumer advertising because of the more clinical nature of the product or service being promoted. Networking equipment, servers and software certainly lack the visual sizzle of fashion, travel or automobiles.

This brings to mind a simple tip for church webmasters that while mentioned quite a bit in the Christian website blogosphere, nevertheless bears repeating. Make sure your website is primarily about people rather than organizations, buildings, programs, ministries, etc. The church is people. One of the best ways to get a good start on ensuring that this is conveyed to your website visitors is to liberally use photos of people (photos that show people’s faces!) throughout your site.

A side note: one additional thing to ask yourself in this regard is what does your church website convey if the most prominent photo on your website is of your pastor?

What are other ways that we can help our church websites to reflect the principle that the church is people rathan than an organization, a building, a set of programs, etc.?

Aaron Brazell wrote a guest article yesterday on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger website which could prove helpful to church webmasters who inadvertently post information about missionaries in creative access nations.

I’ve had to take similar steps in a couple of situations — one in which I was unfortunately not aware in advance that my client did not want to be identified as a missionary and one in which friends of ours moved to a sensitive area of the world and later found that a church was inadvertently publishing their information.

When this sort of thing happens, panic can set in fairly quickly and knowing how to address it quickly helps a great deal. The moral of the story is that it’s good to have a plan in advance!

Rohit Bhargava recently blogged about Placecasting — “sending a message to bluetooth enabled devices within a specified geographic area.”

Within his article, Rohit mentions two solutions for Placecasting: a commercial application provided by Proximity Media (a subsidiary of Wiremedia) and an open-source application named Consola (by the way, if you visit the Consola website, don’t be fooled by the bars that move back and forth in a semi-circle — contrary to what I originally thought, this is not a loading movie for a Flash website — I must have sat there looking at it for a full minute before it dawned on me that it was just an animated logo!).

From the two solutions’ respective websites:

Proximity Media
Wiremedia’s proximity advertising solution allows for the distribution of rich media content and applications to mobile phones, laptops, and other Bluetooth-enabled handheld devices. Content that is engaging, interactive, and informative. The formula works when these wireless devices are relatively close to virtually any public and private spaces that are equipped with Wiremedia’s Bluetooth MediaServer

Consola
Consola is a ‘Bluetooth Proximity Media Server’ application for Mac OS X ‘Tiger’. It detects all Bluetooth enabled devices in range and sends them data such as text, images, animated gifs, audio, flash, video, java, or vCards.

It’s not clear to me if there is some ability to only send content to devices whose owners have granted permission, but assuming that ability is available, I think this presents quite an interesting opportunity for churches to reach out to those in their local area.

Does anyone know more about this technology? I wonder what the range is (which would obviously govern what you might be able to use it for).

How Can We Take Advantage of New Video Ads From Google AdWords?

The internet marketing blogosphere was a bit abuzz yesterday with the news that Google’s AdWords program will soon be adding click-to-play video ads as an option for advertisers who have opted into its content network.

I first learned of this from Darren at ProBlogger.net. At first, I gave more thought to how it could be used by internet marketers working for commercial companies, specifically by the catalog company I work for in my day job. But then Rob challenged churches and ministries to think about how this opportunity could be used to further God’s kingdom.

Video Profiles
My mind must be working slowly these days since I didn’t immediately make a connection between this new opportunity and my preferred web strategy for churches which includes the use of video profiles of believers with specific life experiences or interests. However, Rob’s article prompted me to consider more carefully how the new video ads from Google Adwords could be used effectively in a church’s overall web strategy.

That line of thinking resulted in a proposed strategy in which a church would use short video profiles of members of their congregation to entice unbelievers in their local area to consider the value of a local congregation’s ministry in their own lives. Perhaps an example will be the best way to explain the strategy.

What do you think of these pages from the website of University Christian Fellowship in Syracuse, New York:

• Questions We Get Asked About Our Church Service, and Our Snappy Answers
• UCF Order of Worship

Found on Todd Rhoades’ Monday Morning Insight Blog

Kurt Steinbrueck, the Director of Marketing at OurChurch.com, recently wrote a valuable article about developing your church website in such a way that it will rank well in searches conducted at major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Kurt includes a brief but helpful explanation for several tips such as the following:

• Put the location and denomination of your church in your website’s Title tag
• Put the location, denomination, and other defining information in your website’s description tag
• Put your location, denomination and other local search terms on your homepage
• Register with the major directories and search engines
• And several more (some of which you may not have thought of) even if you’re accustomed to thinking about search engine optimization

The one thing I would like to add to Kurt’s article is that we need to be strategic when we are choosing which key words and phrases to include on our church websites.