Mike Boyink is doing a great thing this week!

Mike runs a website called Train-ee which helps people learn how to use Expression Engine, a great content management system for websites. Mike has just finished a series of articles entitled Building A Church Website. In the process of writing that series, Mike actually created a sample church website.

That could have been the end of the project. But Mike had a better idea. And so he is auctioning off the sample church website at eBay. You can see the sample church website here. The auction will also include a year of hosting, some training/customization from Mike, a year’s subscription to a donor management software package, and more.

Proceeds from the auction will be donated to charity:water, a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. In addition, proceeds from the sale of Mike’s books and screencasts during the auction will also be donated to charity:water. Finally, Mike has provided a PayPal donation link so that even if you’re not interested in the church website or Mike’s training materials, you can still donate to this great cause.

The auction will begin on Wednesday, April 29 at 1:00 p.m. ET. Full details about the auction and a video from Mike are available here on the Train-ee website.

I would strongly encourage you to visit Mike’s site, watch his video (I learned some things I didn’t know about water!), and consider what you might be able to do to help him support a great cause.

Kent Shaffer has posted a helpful video on the Church Relevance blog today about search engine optimization for church websites. What I liked most about his comments was the lack of focus on optimizing for “church” and the city you live in (which is as far as most church website seo goes these days). Instead, he focuses on optimizing (and by implication writing content for) the terms people are actually searching on in your geographic area.

The vast majority of unbelievers today are not searching on “church” at Google. They aren’t interested in us. But strategically including content on our websites which corresponds to the felt needs of unbelievers in our area and then optimizing for related search terms is an effective form of outreach today.

I encourage you to visit the Church relevance blog today to hear what Kent has to say on this important topic.

Do you know about Twitter? I would assume that anyone reading this blog already knows about it, but just in case, here’s a good definition from Wikipedia:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

I just finished reading a new e-book from Anthony Coppedge called The Reason Your Church Must Twitter. With a subtitle of “Making Your Ministry Contagious,” it’s a short, fascinating read.

Within it’s 63 pages, Anthony gives a concise rationale for the church’s use of Twitter. There is no wasted space here — it took me about an hour to read the book and all of the information is valuable.

How A Church Can Use Twitter Effectively
Anthony advocates using Twitter to remind church members of events, drive traffic to the church website, effectively target segments of the congregation (and not send irrelevant information to other segments), pass along urgent prayer requests, keep church members informed of last-minute changes, reinforcing aspects of weekly messages, etc.

I’ve been using Twitter for awhile now (and I must admit that I’m fairly sporadic in my tweets — I still find myself not thinking about it much while I’m in the midst of a project), and have thought about how the church could use its functionality, but Anthony has “taken it to the next level.” His e-book includes a number of great ideas for how the regular use of Twitter could improve a church’s communication with and among its members.

Interesting article in the Christianity Today liveblog — The Tebow Bump. In the article, Ted Olsen points out that at the recent BCS championship college football game, Florida quarterback and the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow changed the scripture reference on his eye black from Philippians 4:13 to John 3:16.

The result? According to the Christianity Today article, John 3:16 became the hottest search on Google. Interesting.

What’s more interesting to me, though, is the generally mediocre (at least from an internet evangelism perspective) results that are displayed when one searches on “John 3:16” at Google.

In the natural Google listings, here are the first 10 results:

• BibleGateway.com passage lookup (New International Version)
• BibleGateway.com passage lookup (King James Version)
• Wikipedia article on John 3:16
• Blue Letter Bible passage lookup
• A Flash animation
• An AllAboutGod article on John 3:16
• The home page of John 3:16 Mission
• Passage lookup on the website of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops
• An article on fanhouse.com about Tim Tebow’s use of the verse on his eye black

Here are the paid listings:

• “Win a free iPhone easily” from prizecarnival.com
• An invitation to bid on John 3:16 at eBay.com (interestingly, the second line in the ad reads “Shop Victoriously”!)
• “John 3:16 at Amazon”

If local churches were already bidding on John 3:16 for local pay-per-click listings (so that their ad was only displayed to people living in their local geographic area), how many people would have been taken from watching the BCS championship game, to searching on Google for “John 3:16”, to clicking on a paid ad from a church in their local area and visiting a page on the church’s website especially designed to intrigue website visitors enough for them to consider joining the church for one of their local gatherings?

What an opportunity that has been missed by local churches across the world!

Obviously, local churches could not be expected to know that Tim Tebow would be displaying John 3:16 on his eye black (since apparently he has displayed Philippians 4:13 in the same location before — I’ve never been a big college football fan, so I may be mistaken). But if they were already bidding on that phrase (which should probably be a natural target for pay-per-click bidding by churches), they would have already been prepared. But since the overwhelming majority of churches have probably never even considered pay-per-click advertising, the opportunity was probably lost forever.

If you look in the right-hand sidebar, you’ll see a new section called “Quick Thoughts.” Let me quickly tell you the main points of how I’m doing this and then strategize for a moment about how something similar might be useful for churches.

I’m a member of a few different social websites (I’ve linked to my profiles in case you’re interested):

• LinkedIn (I use it 3-4 times a week)
• Facebook (I use it every day, usually multiple times)
• Plaxo Pulse (I don’t use it very much - someone invited me, so I signed up)
• Plurk (I just signed up a couple of days ago - I’ve heard good things about it)

Of course, there are many other social networks. I also have a Twitter account (until recently, I hardly ever used it).

If you look in the sidebar under the heading “We Recommend,” you’ll find a link to Turtle Interactive. Turtle Interactive is the design boutique of Tim Bednar.

What can I tell you about Tim? Tim pastored a multi-ethnic, inner city church for nearly 10 years, and so he has a good idea of what makes a church “tick,” so to speak. He’s also a brilliant designer and web developer who develops strategic social websites and applications to facilitate online community. He’s been around the web, and specifically around the portion of the web populated by churches and parachurch ministries, for a long time. That’s why we recommend him so highly.

If you’re a church or ministry in need of a new website, you now have a chance to learn from one of the best!

Tim has recently started a new project called the Ashford WordPress Theme.  This new project was born out of Tim’s recent work with WordPress on Greg Boyd’s new site (worth a look just in itself at www.gregboyd.org). In working with WordPress on this project, Tim realized that “most WordPress themes are not really created for normal people who are responsible for building and maintaining web sites. Most of the time, free WordPress themes offer killer screen shots but are a pain to use.”

The Ashford WordPress Theme is for building simple web sites. Tim’s philosophy is to build a theme which focuses on giving “in place tips on how to build and maintain the site.” He is about to release v0.1.2, and is looking for a few ministries who would be willing to test the Ashford theme and give him feedback on the project. Once this test phase is up and running, Tim will be developing additional subthemes, configurations, page templates and widgets.

To apply to be a test ministry, you can fill out the online application.

I just received an email from Mike Boyink asking me to help get the word out about a new project he’s starting through his Train-ee website.

Before I tell you about the project, though, let me give a quick word of explanation about Train-ee.com.

I’ve been using content management systems from EllisLab for about three and a half years. I first used pMachine and then switched to ExpressionEngine when it was launched. I’ve never been sorry. I now use or have implemented ExpressionEngine on 13 different websites.

Guess where I found out about EllisLab? That’s right — Mike Boyink has been a champion of EllisLab products for over four years, and he was the one who first turned me on to the joys of using EllisLab products.

In January of this year, Mike launched a new site — Train-ee.com — where he shares his wisdom and experience “to help web professionals get up to speed on ExpressionEngine^® as quickly as possible.” Through Train-ee, Mike provides online and in-person training, ebooks, and screencasts, all designed to help you learn the best content management system around in a minimum of time and with a minimum of pain! Mike is considered one of the experts in the ExpressionEngine support forums, and his combination of knowledge, wisdom, internet strategy experience, and extensive experience with ExpressionEngine means there is no one better to help you learn to use this great CMS.

Now, on to Mike’s newest project. One of Mike’s first projects for the Train-ee website was a series on “Building an ExpressionEngine Site - Small Business.” The series was very well-received in the ExpressionEngine community. And now, he will soon begin another “how to Build an ExpressionEngine Site” series, this time building a church website.  At the end of the series when the site is complete it will be auctioned off on eBay, with proceeds going to a TBD charity. You can learn more here:

A New Blog, A New Series

If you have been looking for a content management series for a new church website or to start redevelopment on an old church website, I am confident that this series will prove extremely valuable to you. Mike is the developer of the Manna? church website and is very experienced in working with churches to effectively use their websites. I would strongly encourage you to visit the Train-ee website and start following Mike’s new series!

Dean Peters has posted a great list of ways to use a church website to make it more effective. From the introduction to his article:

A problem I find with many church websites is vision, that those responsible for delivering the goods don’t really see their site as much more than an online color brochure. As a result, more often than not, very little staff and/or funds are allocated to the church’s web presence past the server, the domain name and perhaps a content management service.

In no particular order, I’d like to offer 10 real-world examples you can expand your church and/or charity’s impact by expanding your vision past mere ‘brochureware.’

His second point (“Convert Seekers”) made me think about an aspect of church websites that I have generally resisted in the past and gave me a good reason to consider changing the way I think about that aspect (I’m purposely not telling you what that aspect is to make you go read the article!).

Here’s a link to the article.

By the way, the article appears on a great new site called digital.leadnet.org, a collaborative blog about technology in the church from Leadership Network.

manna?, a church in Holland Michigan, is experiencing a fascinating scenario on the home page of their website. The manna? website is set up differently than most church websites. Here’s a hint of the difference (from the bottom of their home page):

Hey - we don’t hold much on formality at manna?- if you want to contribute something to this weblog there’s no committee to work with. Just register (or log in if you already have) and use the Control Panel to speak your piece.

Did you catch that? Anyone can post a story to the front page of their website.

You might think that’s a recipe for danger, but a person does have to register as a member on the site before they can post, so the church does have some control over what stays on the website (although I believe they moderate after the posts are made rather than before). Although you might think it is dangerous, take a look at this article which was posted to the front page of the site recently (I’m linking to the permanent link of the article because it will eventually fall off the home page as new articles are added). Also take a look at the comments. Fascinating.

A person who has never attended manna? posts to the front page of the site telling them they are planning on attending a service. People from the congregation respond and ask the “newcomers” to introduce themselves. The newcomers are invited to join the congregation for a meal before they ever attend a meeting.

How do you think those people will feel when they show up at their first meeting of the congregation? Will they feel like they already know some of those who are part of the church? Will they feel welcomed?

In my opinion, the potential “danger” is far outweighed by the potential benefit.

What do you think?

Bill Seaver of the MicroExplosion Blog posted recently about a free ebook he wrote called Web Two Point What? A Pastor’s Guide to New Media. It’s being made available via download at the Do More Ministry Blog