So You Want A Church Website?

Archiving to the Glory of God

churchweb — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 16:06:10 +0000

If your church doesn’t have an archive and records program, or if it has one that needs improving, please take a look at the resources listed in this post on my other blog, NeoArch. As you can see, I am much more active over there, but it usually has very little to do with what’s going on over here. But, today it does.

Church Libraries

churchweb — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 03:50:49 +0000

Does your church have a library? Mine does. Does your church have a fully functional online catalog? Mine doesn’t. Do you want one for your library? Yeah, me too. I am investigating a couple of possibilities right now for what we could use. A couple of projects look really promising. If you want to investigate them for your library, check out OpenBiblio, PhpMyLibrary, Emilda, and Koha. These are all fully functional OPACs. They may be a little much for what you want. I think they allow for cataloging, circulation, and an online catalog. If you these functions are overkill and you just want to list your books, consider signing up for an account with LibraryThing. We may yet go in this direction, but LibraryThing lacks circulation functions. It’s cheap, fun, and a great program, but it lacks circ functions. Anyway, it’s something to think about. I will try to post more as I evaluate some of these programs.

If anyone has any experience in this area, please let me know. I would love to know if other churches have tried to tackle a web OPAC project, or if they have ruled one out. Just leave us all a comment. That’s what they’re there for.

Recording Sermons Podcasts With Stuff You Already Have in Your Kitchen Cabinet

churchweb — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 03:46:10 +0000

Well, not quite…but I do want to address how to make podcasts of sermons with stuff that you probably already have. Really, if you have a computer, you can probably do all this without spending any money whatsoever.

I plan on doing a series here on ChurchWeb on how you can podcast your church’s sermons. In this installment, I want to explain how you can record your church’s sermons for $0 with equipment you probably already have. To record your sermons for podcasting, you need four things.

A sound system with a soundboard
A Pentium 3 or higher computer
Audacity open source audio software (if you have a Mac, you can use GarageBand, but you can also use Audacity. I recommend Audacity. It converts WAV to MP3 and stuff like that.
A 3.5mm male to male cable (pictured below)

You may also need an adapter to make the plug fit into your soundboard. That’s it. That’s all you need. Really.

Here is what you need to do. First, download the stable version of Audacity from sourceforge, and if necessary, download the extension to Audacity that allows it to work with mp3s (This may not be necessary in the new editions.) Run the program. It is really intuitive. Even if you’re dumber than a bag of hammers, you can figure out how to record.

Create a file on your desktop (or where ever you like) called sermons. This is where you will save your sermons.

Second, plug one end of the cable into the microphone port on your computer, and the other end into one of the line out plugs on your sound board (just ask your sound guy where he would plug it in to record on a tape deck).

Now, open Audacity and test the program with your sound system. All you have to do is hit the record button. Work with your sound guy to make sure that the files are being saved and that the sound is not popping. That’s really all there is to it. You should develop a schema for how you want to number the sermons. At my church, we save the the files as according to the year, month, and date, along with m for mornings or e for evenings (ie. 20060204m). Save the file as both .aup (Audacity’s format) and .mp3. Now all you have to do is mount the .mp3 on your server space and you are ready to go.

See, it’s cheap and effective. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. We will look at how to mount these files on a server in a later post.

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Dynamic and Static Websites

churchweb — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:34:29 +0000

When thinking of building a website for your church, you have a major decision to make. You must decide whether you want a static or dynamic site. This may also mean that you need to realize that there are different types of websites. When you are cruising around on the internet, you will run into two different types of websites, static and dynamic. Static websites consist of a whole bunch of HTML files that are linked together by a series of hyperlinks. Each page is just a file, and what you request from the server is exactly what the server gives you. The server finds the file and gives it back to you without adding anything to it. Think of the way you request a file, say a Microsoft Word file, from the hard drive on your computer. You click on the file, and the computer opens the file just as you saved it. This is the way static sites work. If a webpage ends in the extension .html, it is probably static. These are the easiest types of sites to build, and with a little thought, you can have a really nice one up in a matter of hours. You can make an HTML site look good and it will be functional. HTML sites are usually smaller sites that do not go through a whole lot of changes. My first foray into designing a church website was a static site. Here is a mock up of what it looked like:
Click on it if you want to see a bigger version. Notice that there was nothing fancy. It was just a clean looking site that I made using pure HTML and CSS. All the pages on the site were based on this template.

The second type of site is dynamic. Dynamic sites often change their content frequently. A dynamic site consists of a whole bunch of files that exist on a database of some sort on the server. When you request a page in this scenario, the server assembles the page on the fly from several files in the database. You might have one file that has your main text, one file that has your side bar, one file that has your header, and another file that has your footer. All of these files are in the database. When a person requests a page, say a page like the one you are currently looking at, all of these pieces come together in the page. All of this happens on the server. Dynamic pages can be used to give multiple church members publishing priveleges, to produce interactive web-based calendars, to produce a weblog (blog), to draw in headlines from newspapers, to collect tithes online from church members, to podcast or vidcast sermons, or to enable pretty much any other neat feature you have seen on someone else’s websites. Dynamic sites usually end with and extension other than HTML. Often it will be something like .php, .cgi, or .asp. Our current church site is dynamic (although it currently lacks the visual appeal of our first site–hopefully that will be fixed in time).

All of this is to say that one of the first decisions you need to make regarding your site is what do you want it to do. If you just want a site that will not change much and that will list service times, location, ministries, and the like, go with a static site.

If you want a site that “does stuff,” like calendars, blogs, and the like, go with a dynamic site. You are probably going to need the same basic tools for either type of site. You will need to understand or learn some basic HTML and possibly some CSS, but that’s about it. You do not necessarilly need to know how to manipulate databases and make a server run to produce a dynamic site. There are very good server companies that will set all that up for you so that you can just add your content. You just decide what you want.

If you have any questions about making this decision, please post them in a comment. I would be glad to dialogue with anyone about how they can make the best decision for their church.

Top 10 Reasons Your Church Should Have A Website

churchweb — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 22:34:55 +0000

If you are reading this page, you probably do not need to be convinced to have a church website, but maybe someone in your church does, so with apologies to David Letterman, here goes.

It is a good way to help new people within your community find your church.
You can build and host a nice website for very little money (less than $150).
It offers visitors an unobtrusive way to find out information about your church.
You can use your web address for nice, clean branding on items such as pens and stationary.
It opens up a whole new avenue of ministry in which church members can use their abiilities.
It allows your pastor to comment quickly on current issues.
It allows your members to download sermons rather than purchasing tapes.
It gives you a public place to keep useful resources such as your constitution, your newsletters, and your membership policies.
It allows you to point members of your church to other useful web resources.
Outsiders will think your church is progressive, even if you only do hymns in worship.

There are hundreds of others I am sure. Please feel free to add your own in a comment. I don’t have the market cornered.

Patience

churchweb — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 21:56:03 +0000

For those wanting to use this site, please have patience. I am developing the content for the site. Hopefully, features such as the web glossary will be up soon. If there is a specific subject (podcasting, servers, etc.) that you are curious about, please request in a comment. I will be glad to try to get to it quickly.

So You Want A Church Website?

churchweb — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 03:12:22 +0000

So you want a website for your church but you are not sure where to start? Hopefully, you are at the right place to find some helpful suggestions and answers to help you in the process. First, let me give you a little background about me, and why you should listen to me. I am not a pastor. I do not work (for pay) in a church. I am a deacon at my church, and I have been working on the website at our church for almost a year. When I started the process, our church had no website. We wanted one because our church is located in a rural area on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky. We hoped it would help potential visitors find our church. We thought it would allow our visitors to know more about our church. We wanted to supply our members with resources such as blogs, articles, links, and audio downloads that would be useful to them. We wanted to do all this for very little money because the church is not very large.

Now all of these goals seemed pretty lofty, and I had no experience building websites. But I was willing to do a little research to learn how websites work and how I could build one. I don’t have a degree in computer science. I am not a genius. I don’t have a house filled with computers that I constantly tinker with. I am just a normal guy who was just slightly curious and did a good bit of reading. I have learned alot over the last year, and I would like to share these things with you so that hopefully you can get your church website up with less pain that I had.

I want you to know that if you know enough to find this site, you can probably build a functional, useful, and possibly beautiful website for your church. And most importantly, you can do it well for a small amount of money (less than $10 per month). So, I hope you enjoy the journey. If you have any particular topics you would like me to address, please leave a comment. I will try to take requests (Skynyrd fans, please refrain from typing “Freebird” in all caps).