1. Website and Email Lists for Your Church?
Paul Tukey & George Drumbor
Communication Assessment & Strategy Committee
NJ Association of the UCC
Oct 4, 2003

2. Why Build a Website? Articulate the reasons well, at the outset
Who will it serve? Target audiences?
Members? – a communication medium
Local community?
Recruiting new members?
Visitors from across cyberspace?
Having target audiences in mind guides the choice of content!

3. Resources Required One person to lead the project
With some technical knowledge
Possibly a student, but plan for the future!
Willing to explore, solve problems, commit time, make decisions, follow through
A committee to help plan, design, implement
Strong support from church & ministers
Contribution of content by various groups
A budget & a credit card
But it’s not expensive!
A computer with Internet access

4. Overall Steps - 1 Socialize the idea at church, get support
Line up people to participate
Seek ones with experience, expertise
Consider target audiences
Visit many websites to get ideas
Esp. church websites in your various communities
Line up your resources
Plan your initial content
Choose design criteria & a design
Need a graphical designer? No, but…

5. Overall Steps - 2 Choose & register a domain name
Choose a web hosting company (web server)
Considerations, varying costs & trade-offs
Some offer “soup-to-nuts” e.g. Web Medley at UCC
Choose & acquire software “tools” for…
Creating & editing webpages
Manipulating simple graphical images
Again there are many choices, costs, trade-offs

6. Overall Steps - 3 Learn… Your webpage editing & image editing tools
How to upload pages & images to the webserver
The rudiments of html & hyperlinks
How to acquire graphical images
How to download other’s webpages to study and even “borrow” from them

7. Overall Steps - 4 Deploy your initial website Get feedback
Iterate (until everyone is satisfied)
Get your website indexed by Google, etc
Make plans for on-going maintenance and regular content updates
Plan for the long haul!
It’s harder to ensure longevity than to create the website initially!

8. Advance Planning Content Design Target audience(s) Experiment!
Scope: which areas to cover, which to leave out
Static vs. evolving content
Design
“Look and feel”, fonts, point sizes, colors, layout
Number of pages, navigation among them
Good design criteria
Need a graphical designer?
Target audience(s)
How to balance needs of multiple audiences
Experiment!
Try out possibilities, get feedback from church

9. Some Pitfalls Stale content Burnout – if one person does it all
People promising to help but not showing up
Loss of interest
It’s more fun to create it than to maintain it
Student web helpers
They graduate and leave, all too soon
Lack of access to your webserver
If the initial webmaster leaves the picture

10. Pitfalls (cont’d) Poor design Being too ambitious
Inconsistency, excessive glitz, confusing navigation,…
Being too ambitious
Creating more content than anyone is willing to maintain
Creating a design that makes content posting hard
Technical glitches that can take your website offline and require troubleshooting or technical support
Conflicting advice from various experts in the church
Time sink (or $$$ sink)
Buying expensive software that no one uses

11. Other Considerations Be careful about posting:
Pictures of kids
Home phone numbers
addresses
Copyright (yours, others)
Internal search engine
Searchability by Google, etc
Password-protected pages for members
Printability of web pages
How your website fits in with your church’s other communication media (e.g. post newsletters as pdf files?)

12. Emailing Lists Very powerful & quick communication
Much faster and cheaper than US Mail
Very useful for committees & boards
Useful for “whole congregation” only if
A large fraction have
You can get them to sign up
You ensure the others aren’t left out

13. Emailing Lists – Some Issues
Protection from spam, viruses
List-serve vs. centrally managed
Keeping track of changing addresses
Requires constant attention
More technical than making a simple website
Can be linked to website in useful ways

14. Possibilities for today
Websites to visit, walk thru, critique:
Other church websites in Summit
Other NJA church websites
NJA > CAC > UCC
George’s favorites

15. Possibilities - 2 Build a simple “church” website from scratch
Show image capture/edit/deployment
Edit raw HTML
WYSIWYG editing with MS Word, FrontPage, etc
Use FileZilla for ftp (publishing to server)