I’ve spent the last few days searching, and I’ve found 42 groups so far!  It’s crazy.  About half of them (22) are by/for students, a few Sunday School classes have their own, our music ministry has 7 groups, our Academy has 3, and then there are a few others.  Even our MOPS ladies made their own group!

Now granted, a lot of them are tiny and/or dead (”Girls Retreat 07″), but many are quite vibrant.   So how does this affect you?

First, find your church groups that are out there already.  It’s taken me a while to track all of these down, and I’m sure there’s a few more out there.  Run some group searches with variations of your church name (”mount bethel”, “mt bethel”, “mt. bethel”, “mtb”, etc).  Once you’ve exhausted that, find church members on Facebook and see what groups they are already in.

Second, think about what other kinds of groups you can offer.  A church member built a group for Live it Live (children’s worship program at our church), and our media folks have started posting weekly videos to the group.  We also just added a group for our Encounter (contemporary) service, where they’ll be posting photos, videos, sermon notes, etc.  Both of those could be of great value to our members, and great outreach to potential visitors.

Once you’ve done that, you can cross-promote between Facebook and your site.  Link to Facebook groups from your site (”for more about our upcoming trip to Kenya, join our Facebook group“).  Link back to your site (when appropriate) from your Facebook group.

As church webmasters, we need to start letting go of a little control.  You used to want everyone to come to your site, and that’s still an admirable goal.  However, job #1 is getting information to those that need it, which often doesn’t involve your site.  Our blog posts go out to RSS subscribers, e-mail subscribers, Twitter users, FriendFeed users, etc.  Many people get our bulletin via e-mail, which has lots of great info on it.  We have a lot of members that subscribe to our Podcasts.  Others obviously use Facebook.  None of those people may visit our site, but that’s ok.  As long as they get the information, they’ll still hopefully visit the church and connect with people there, which is the main goal of church-related digital communications.

How else can you use Facebook to facilitate activites at your church?

Post from: Church Website Help

How much does your church use Facebook? The answer might surprise you.

First, it’ll help if you have a true on-site search of some kind.  From what I can tell, there’s no way to add search boxes if you use the Google custom search on your site.  If you find a way around that, let us know.

As for our site, it only took a couple of very small changes:

• The search needs to produce a GET request, not a POST request.  The difference is that a GET request will put your search term in the URL, which is critical to make this work.
• You may need to change your search string variable.  I noticed that most sites use “s=whatever” when you search, so I changed ours to that to help Chrome easily figure out what we were doing.
• That’s it!

Post from: Church Website Help

Add your church site search to your Chrome home page

But what about us webmasters?  Will we have to start worrying about another browser when building our sites?  Not really.  The great news about Chrome is that it’s built on top of Webkit, which also powers Opera (and a few others).  This means that the basic rendering engine is one that you’ve probably already checked your site against, so it’s nothing new.

Keep an eye on my SEO site tomorrow to see when Chrome is available for download.  If you have a Windows machine, it’ll certainly be worth trying, even if it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Update: It’s available!  You can download Chrome here.

Post from: Church Website Help

How will “Chrome” affect your church site?

I told them that before I could run their ad, I had to see some of the work they’ve done.  One example they provided me with was for Grace Fellowship Church in Williamsburg, VA.  After looking over the site, I feel good recommending Salted Websites to you.

If you look through the GFC website and think about how it might be reviewed on here, you’ll realize that they do a pretty solid job.  The navigation is built in plain text, they use good page titles, and it has a nice, clean look.  I can’t really review the content of the site, since that is handled by the church and not by SW.

My only real complaint with the site is having the address/phone buried in an image.  It hurts your SEO (just a tiny bit, though) and makes it so I can’t copy/paste the info.  What if I want to drop the address into Google Maps and get directions?  I have to re-type it.  All things considered, though, that’s a very small issue compared to most church sites.

You can visit SW’s examples page to see a few more sites that they’ve built.  If you’re looking to get your church website redesigned, you should check them out.  Their prices are very reasonable and they seem to do a very good job.

If you have any questions, please view their FAQ or just fill out their contact form.

Post from: Church Website Help

Salted Websites

Using EarthSwoop, I thought it’d be neat to show all of the places that we’re sending mission teams this summer.  You could do the same thing for local missions, youth group trips, or anything else outside of your church.

So, I put in all of our mission trip locations, then embedded it into the blog on our site.  Here it is:

Powered by EarthSwoop | More info about this collection

Post from: Church Website Help

More fun ways to use the Google Earth plugin

Google has recently released the “Google Earth Plugin”.  It’s a free plug-in that runs Google Earth (3D buildings and everything) right in your browser!  It’s quite slick.

The problem is that it’s kind of a pain to use it on your site.  The Digital Earth Blog just did a round-up of the best ways to use it to embed a map in your site, but I think the clear winner for churches is ShareIt.  It makes it very simple to add a map to your site — probably less than 30 seconds to get the code you need.  Here is what it looks like on your site:

Powered by Google Earth Hacks | Map Details | Create your own!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Post from: Church Website Help

Another way to show a neat map on your website

At our church, we struggled for a while to find a good way to use this to help reach our congregation, but we’re finally starting to use it effectively.  We’ve come up with a few good uses for it so far:

• http://twitter.com/mtbethelumc — This is essentially just a feed from our blog, using the WordPress plug-in called Twitter Tools.  We plan to expand it to cover more topics, but it’s just a blog feed for now.
• http://twitter.com/mtbethelmusic — Our Senior High Choir Tour is currently in progress, and they’re using Twitter to keep the congregation (especially their parents!) informed about the trip.  We’ve done this with other trips, with decent success.
• http://twitter.com/mtbethelrec — We have a very active recreation ministry, and this is updated if conditions on our field are bad, so parents know whether games have been canceled or not.  It’s very useful for the parent on the go to get a text message with the info, rather than having to pull up the website or call the church office.  We also push this Twitter feed to our main website and our mobile website, using a free script called Twitter2HTML.

Other churches are starting to get on board.  Oak Leaf Church has just launched a Twitter feed.  There’s not much there yet, but they plan on adding things such as important announcements, prayer requests, etc.

The great thing about Twitter is that it works for users of any skill level.  If you just want updates, click the link and read them.  Want an RSS feed?  Subscribe.  Have your own Twitter account?  Follow ours.  Want to stay even more informed? Follow ours and enable text messaging.

All of this Twittering leads to a growing problem: fragmentation.  Using our church as an example, we have a YouTube account, a SmugMug account, a blog, three podcasts and five twitter accounts.  How to keep up?  Enter FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a quickly growing service that helps pull together all of your various feeds.  We have a FriendFeed account that pulls all 11 of those feeds onto one page.  I have a page of my own that pulls information from 14 sources.  We haven’t started promoting it for the church very much yet, but I’m making sure our account is as connected as possible, because the service is growing very quickly.

How does your church use Twitter? Have you started working with FriendFeed yet?  Or any other similar services?

Post from: Church Website Help

Twitter, FriendFeed and your church website

When they changed to their new design a few years ago, I told them it might be a problem to have everything in Flash like that.  The site looks great and is easy to navigate, but the all-Flash approach is a killer.

For starters, Google can’t read much of it, including the primary navigation.  They’re a pretty large church (over 4000 members), yet Google only has 266 pages in their index.  That is bound to create a lot of missed opportunities.  It doesn’t matter how great your site is if people can’t find it.

Back to my problem — directions.  I found their directions page easily enough and the content on it is pretty good.  The address is always at the top of the page, and this page has both a map and text directions on it.  The problem is that it’s ALL buried in Flash!

I can hover over the map image to view it larger, but I can’t click on it to get a large jpg to print.  Since the text is all in Flash, it won’t print nicely either.  To the right is what their directions look like in the “print preview”.  Helpful, huh?

Also, this text being in Flash once again kills potential Google traffic.  For example, their directions page mentions that they’re near Perimeter Mall.  I doubt many churches can say that, but someone may search for it.  If we search for “church near perimeter mall“, they don’t even show up in the top 100!

This leads to three points:

• If your church is near a major landmark, be sure to mention it on your site, both for the sake of your visitors and for Google.
• If you put information like that on the site, make sure Google can see it.
• Make sure I can print your directions page!

As for me, I just went to Google Maps and printed directions from there instead.  I really just need to get a new GPS.

Post from: Church Website Help

People might want to print your directions page

What are the main things new folks in town are looking for in a church website?  Is it information on specific ministries?  If so, which inistries does that tend to be?  Children and families? Is it service times and directions?

What are the MAIN few things?

It’s a remarkably difficult thing to answer.  Different people are looking for different things.  By looking into the long tail keywords that find your site you can get some idea, but it’s still very broad.

However, his e-mail said specifically “new folks in town”, which helps narrow it down quite a bit.  Based on that, we’ll assume a few things.  These wouldn’t be true in every case, but probably in most:

• They don’t know the area very well.
• They’re already Christians and they’re simply looking for a new church.
• There’s a good chance they already know what denomination they prefer and they’ll stick to it, though that’s becoming less important to a lot of people.

Based on those items, what’s important?  I would have to say, in random order:

• Directions/location.  Saying you’re on the “corner of 9th & Main” won’t help, since they don’t know where 9th or Main is.  Give them a good map, your full address, along with text based directions from each direction into town.  A photo of your building on the directions page can help put them more at ease too.
• Your service times/locations/types.  Do you have a contemporary service?  What’s it like?  What time is each service? What building is each service located in?
• Information for their kids.  Sunday school and nursery being the main two.  Where is the nursery?  What ages can go there?  Where is Sunday School for each grade?  Is there a program for their middle-schooler, or should they come to the service?
• Membership information.  I don’t like to push this information on new visitors too much, especially if they’ve never joined a church before, but this fictional family is probably looking to put down roots.  At the very least, provide some information on what your membership process looks like.

What else?  What other items do you think should be on the list?

Post from: Church Website Help

When people are new to an area, what do they want from your site?

Some of the specifics that Dean mentions:

• Bad Markup
• Browser-Specific Navigation — Things that only work in certain browsers
• Charging Money for Sermons
• Poor Navigation Hierarchy
• Too Much Flash

He gets into more detail about why each item can cause problems.  It’s a good read - check it out.

Post from: Church Website Help

Don’t Be Inaccessible