Since those bad days, I have gone through three operating systems, two new computers and have finally bought an up-to-date version of Adobe Creative Suite. However, I’m still fundamentally a curious person when it comes to technical things, so I thought someone else might also be interested in the sort of tools I am using to do my work.

This, therefore, is part one of a run-down of my current toolkit!

Macbook Air

My main work computer is a 13 inch Macbook Air. I chose to go for the Air because I was looking for a reliable, fast computer for work that was also light-weight enough to carry around town and go to lectures with. Linux was out of the question because I needed to use serious design software and 10 years of fighting problem after problem with Windows machines had left me jaded, tired and wanting something more reliable that I could just use.

I’m happy to say that my beautiful Air (his name is Duncan) has fulfilled these requirements. Its SSD hard drive and processor means that is whizzes through pretty much any task I ever throw at it design wise, whilst its battery means I can do Word Processing/Note-taking type tasks pretty much all day without needing to go back and charge up.

I chose the slightly bigger hard drive at 256GB as I knew the software I was installing would soon fill up 100GB (as indeed they did). 256GB is still not huge as hard drives go these days, but big enough for my music and work collections.

All my data is backed up via Time Machine to a 1TB hard disk (a new purchase after its predecessor had an unfortunate argument with a floor). Bigger media files are also stored on the Hard Disk.

Phone

My Phone is an Android LG Optimus One running the CyanagenMod version of Android. It was the first smart phone I got and is very much an entry level model. It has performed faithfully, but I am slightly irritated at how slow it often runs, the fact the battery frequently doesn’t make it through a whole day and how quickly it fills up. However, money means it will probably be around for at least another year. However, if you feel God might be telling you to donate me a new iPhone or better Android, please don’t hesitate to get in touch . . . ;-)

Adobe Creative Suite

I bought Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 at the same time as I bought my Mac. As I had previously been using Photoshop CS1 and Dreamweaver 8 (so pre-Adobe days), I was astounded by how much smoother the work flow had become between the different software packages. When added to Mac OS X’s drag-and-drop method of opening files, this results in huge increases in productivity.

I love Adobe’s products, even if their business model tends to be a bit draconian, and they really have some great offerings. I spend most of my time in Photoshop and Dreamweaver designing and then coding up. I would love to get to know Fireworks a bit more, but time constraints sadly put a limit on the amount of stuff I can learn in one go.

Web browsers

My main browser is Chrome simply because of how lightweight it is on my system resources (I’ve always found Firefox a bit clunky and aged, and Opera is just not an option for me). I do all my design work first in Chrome and then check on other browsers. I have Opera, Safari and Firefox all installed on the computer and an old Windows laptop that can be coaxed into life to check on Internet Explorer.

Other software

In terms of the other software that floats around my design process, I have a lot of apps that I find really increase my productivity and work-flow rates.

I find Evernote to be a great app for taking notes. As creative people are fundamentally collectors and horders, I find that Evernote is a great way of organising these stream-of-conscious notes into categories and tags. Evernote is the place where I write all my project proposals, collect all my inspiration, plan my sermons, take notes, scribble essay plans, plan out goals, jot down business plans. And the other great thing is when I’m away from my own computer, I can still access it all online, as everything is automatically synced.

Deployment from my computer to the web is normally done through a combination of Gitbox and terminal shell over SSH. When I absolutely have to deploy via FTP (and I have got over being a grumpy bunny about the fact I have to do it through FTP), I use Cyberduck, which is a reasonably good FTP client. It is, however, missing the key feature of allowing me to only overwrite files that have actually changed, which greatly slows down uploads.

In terms of communication, I generally use Skype for client calls and a Google Mail backend for all my email work. I keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the world via Reeder, which is a very pleasant RSS reader with a great typography and a cool, calming grey colour scheme.

For music I just use iTunes combined with LastFM for scobbling. I find iTunes does everything I need it to do and flawlessly manages my Podcasts and iPod. By and large, I have little interest in streaming music – I like to own the music I listen to, partly to support the original artists and partly because the quality is almost always significantly better than streaming music.

The world of web hosting can seem to be full of lots of scary, intimidating and confusing terminology. You might be getting in a mess wondering why you need 500 different software packages (you don’t) and whether you need to be getting a qualification in zoology the web hosting package comes with Python (which, it turns out, is actually a programming language).

Therefore, allow me to present the basic, beginners guide to church website hosting. Quite simply, I have listed some of the key terms you need to know, what they mean and what you should be looking for. If it’s not here, unless you have special requirements for your websites, you can probably feel free to ignore it! 

Domain name

The first thing each website needs is a domain name. That’s the thing you type into the address bar on your browser and which hooks your computer up with the website’s computer. If you like, it is the website’s postal address.

There’s not a lot to say here. Domain names that describe your website and its brand are helpful both for people’s memory and, to a lesser extent, for search engine optimisation.

.co.uk and .org.uk domain names are generally cheaper than .com and .org. I recommend, however, buying all variations of your domain name (so .org.uk, .co.uk, .org and .com) if they are available. This is just good practice to protect your brand from being stolen or to prevent some bored sweaty idiot from buying a related domain name and using it to promote drugs or pornography to innocent visitors who are actually trying to access your website.

File space

File space is the amount of physical files you are allowed to store on the web server (the web server, by the way, is a arty farty fancy name for ‘computer in a warehouse where your website is stored’). It’s fair to say moreorless any modern web hosting package will give you more than enough web storage space.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of information that people are allowed to download from your website. Every time someone loads a page or views an image on your website, they are downloading a few hundred kilobytes of data. Every time they listen to that lovely sermon podcast (by the way, did you know I created a great bit of free software for managing sermons), they are probably downloading 20 – 30MB of data. All of this data costs money.

Therefore, sit down and decide what sort of files you have on your website, how many people you anticipate downloading them a month and then choose a bandwidth allowance accordingly. For instance, I don’t serve audio or video from this website, so I don’t have a particularly high amount of bandwidth. Other sites I work with, however, have two sermon downloads a week, so they need several tens of gigabytes of bandwidth a month.

MySQL databases

This acronym, whilst looking scary, is in fact not that tricky. A database is a computer whizz way of relating different bits of information together through a bit of software (we all probably know that from our general knowledge). MySQL is just a special bit of software that happens to be a) free and b) work really quite well in a web context.

The chances are that, even if you don’t use a MySQL database now, you might well do in the future. WordPress, for instance, relies on a MySQL database, as do hundreds of other every day, common bits of web software. Speaking as a website designer, I can’t remember the last time I made a full website that didn’t need MySQL. It’s such a common thing these days – just get a software package that offers it to be sure.

There are a variety of programming languages that can connect to MySQL. Which ones you use depend on the software you are using, but if you get a website that supports PHP5 (the most popular programming language), you’ll be able to take advantage of most software. If it supports Ruby and Python, too, you’ll be laughing all the way home.

FTP Access

FTP access is the traditional way of uploading information to a website. Whilst I am personally not a fan (it’s not really powerful or quick enough for the sort of websites I am working with), it’s a good way of beginning to work with web servers. If you are going to be uploading files to your website with FTP (and my guess is you probably will), then you will need a good bit of software to help you. I recommend Filezilla for Windows or Cyberduck for Mac.

Now, as a theology student, I have no problem in principle with technical theological words. Indeed, we need technical words in order to talk concisely and precisely about what God – trying to talk about the Trinity in a theology essay without words like procession, begotten, indwelling, personhood, immanent and transcendent would make for both very bloated and unclear reading (and heaven forbid theologians got a name for being unclear!).

However, that’s not the task we are doing on our church websites. If we are doing our job correctly when we are making a church website, we should be telling people who maybe have no familiarity with church about who God is, what he has done and what it means for them, us as a community and for the whole world.

We should be speaking good news – and good news is only seen as good when it is understood (and 1 Corinthians 1 suggests that understanding the good news can be hard enough work without bad writing getting in the way!).

Here’s my suggestion of a few common Christianese pitfalls in church content writing and how to avoid them.

Don’t assume too much knowledge.

A lot of church websites (and Statement of Faith pages are particularly bad at doing this) assume that the person reading the webpage has at least a foundational course in Systematic Theology behind them, and so uses words which carry a lot of weight but little meaning to the uninitiated. This acts as a shibboleth (see what I did there!) to people aren’t part of the church – and, presumably, these are exactly the people that a church website is looking to reach!

For instance, statements about the Bible spend loads of time talking about its inerrancy, infallibility and its sufficiency. Even if these are useful concepts (and I’m far from convinced they are), they might as well be written in ancient Chinese as far as 90% of the population is concerned! For one thing, they are terms rooted within specific historic debates and times – and for another, even those who think they are true cannot decide exactly what each one means.

If a term is important enough to include, it’s important enough to explain properly in everyday terms – including the implications of it.

Remember, church websites aren’t theology theses but an invitation and instruction as to where thirsty people can find true, living water that will quench their thirst!

Don’t write in propositional lists

It may come as a shock, but church websites are not actually submitted in evidence to the Spanish Inquisition. Therefore, there is almost always no actual need to write in long, propositional lists - and let’s be honest, most people won’t actually read it. Unless you are writing a website for someone like the Evangelical Alliance or a national denomination, who might need to clarify their shared basis for action, stick to writing narrative prose about who God is, what he has done and what it means for you as a church.

There is another important mission reason for leaving the long propositional lists aside – most under 30s don’t see the world in propositions (at least not in everyday thought) but in narrative and what might be called ‘enacted liturgy’ – repeated patterns, words, actions or communities that take on meaning as they come into contact with people’s lives. Therefore, if a church website gives 20 bullet points, they are instantly going to turn off and assume the gospel isn’t relevant to them.

Oh and a personal request – can we get rid of using the words ‘Bible-believing‘ as a euphemism to say that a church is conservatively Evangelical (and probably highly Reformed). The implication that other churches just go around making things up or don’t believe in the Bible because they don’t agree on issues of women in leadership, penal substitution or the correct grammatical reading of ‘faith in Christ’ leaves really quite a sour taste in the mouth and is really not helpful for considering ourselves as one group of people united around God. Are you Conservative Evangelical? Then write that and embrace your identity in a positive way.

Don’t tell me what you’re not

I am always amazed by church websites that spend precious words telling me what they’re not – liberal, charismatic, evangelical or wishy-washy being some favourite labels to deny. I turns me off reading long disclaimers about what a church isn’t – and I’ve grown up in a Christian sphere! Think how it must read for normal [sic] people.

Instead, spend your time telling me who you are. Capture my mind, my heart, my imagination with your values, your story, where your church is going, what it is doing, what God is doing. Trust me, I will react much more enthusiastically to that than to a long description telling me how you don’t raise your hands more than 32cm or less than 18cm in worship.

Please, please, please, please don’t murder prepositions

There is an inexplicable and slightly cultic fascination in some Christian circles for using weird and archaic prepositions in the middle of sentences (and in those horrific Statements of Faith bullet pointed lists!).

Faced with the possibility of writing something about God, it seems that normal people who drink tea, eat cheese and enjoy watching Dr Who suddenly become second rate Charles Dickens impersonators, dropping archaic ‘thus’ and ‘unto’ into every sentence. Something that’s particularly holy and good is marked out of such by being of God rather than the universally acknowledged (but presumably sinfully corrupted) from God.

The dead technically can be raised unto eternal life, but I’m sure most people would agree it would sound much nicer (and less inconvenient for the dead) if they were simply raised to enjoy eternal life.

Archaic or simply false prepositions make writing sound jolted, stiff and false. They put distance and coldness between the writer and the reader and they . . . well, they just sound stupid!

Oh, and one more thing: please can we get rid of this idea of loving on someone and having a heart for. There are a myriad of stylistically better, less cliched and less 15-year-old-teenage-American-girl ways of saying we care for people and we get excited about things. Let’s start use them – after all, we worship the God who created the whole world just by speaking words. I’d have thought the least we could do in return was to try and be creative, practical, accessible and beautiful in our own use of language!

What are your big Christianese bugbears you would like to see disappear from the face of the earth (or at the very least from the face of Christian websites)? Share them in the comments below!

However, even if you’re not someone who is professionally working in this field – or if you are someone who is about to start working alongside a web designer – church websites are great fun. There is a sense of energy and excitement as you embark on the process of making something. You see things in the world you never used to: colours, shapes, words.

It can all become a little bit of a drug.

That’s why it’s important to take some time before you start actually making anything to plan and define the scope of the project. One of the most important questions is: how do we know when we have a successful church website? What says that we have succeeded?

Markers of success?

In order to tease out some of the answer to this question (which is going to be in the heads of many people – not least your church leadership, which is likely paying for the web design process), we need to go a step further back and think about another question: what is the purpose of our website?

You see, very few websites just appear out of thin air. They are there for a reason. That reason may be foggy or hidden away, but they are there for a reason.

Maybe they exist to tell church members about up-coming events in the church, how to more effectively give to the church or to answer questions about church structure.

Maybe they exist (and I would argue this should be the primary purpose) to enable people outside the church to find you and to get to know a bit about who you are and what your story is.

Maybe they exist to highlight a project or an outreach you are doing – this could be a mini-website on its own domain name, for example. In this scenario, the church exists for people who want to find out about what the project is doing.

Once you have an idea as to the base purpose of the website, you are in a position to start to lay down for success.

Make them countable, make them easy to measure, make them mean something

The secret of a successful website, the one thing that underlies every other web design tip I can give, is that you are trying to get a user to do something on your website.

Click a link, become a member of a Facebook group, download the notice sheet, register for a newsletter (by the way, did you see I have a newsletter you can sign up to – it gives you even more free web design advice for churches) or find out service times.

When you know the purpose of your website, then you can define what you want your user to do in order to fulfil that purpose.

Your purpose is to inform people how to more effectively give to the church? Then you want to have clear advice about how to give which people access – and maybe an opportunity to give online.

If your purpose is to inform visitors about your church, then you want them to access a visitors guide.

In both of these scenarios, you don’t just want a user to load your website’s homepage – you want them to do something measurable: click a link or download something.

These concrete actions then become your marks for success. When you are measuring how effective your website is, these are what you measure. When you are evaluating your design, these are the boundaries by which you evaluate.

Setting down these markers before you design anything means you don’t get caught up in a weird spiral of trying to chase Facebook ‘Likes’ when you don’t need them or trying to increase the number of visitors to your homepage when actually what you want to be doing is increasing the number of visitors to the page about Homegroups.

Success markers mean you can spend more time on what actually matters for making your website a success and less time trying to catch Red Herrings.

Success markers are a basic, fundamental element to planning a website.

So, today, sit down with all the people who have a voice in your church or charity web design and work out what your success markers are, what people should be doing and how you are going to measure them. Then, in 6 months, come back again, review, improve accordingly, rinse and repeat.

Trust me – this advice will increase the success of your website like no other.

The camp was organised in response to many young adults who are connected to the church but don’t feel that they have a creative outlet in which to voice their questions about God, faith and the church. It is an opportunity to come together, to be church together and to ask questions about the traditions we have received, the way we do things and what is important to us as Christians.

The camp combines a worship training camp with a summer Bible school, an art conference, a sports camp and simply the opportunity to relax. In the evening, everyone comes together discuss questions such as “how does the church react to the challenges of our time?”, “how does the church respond to people who surround it?”, and “how does the church engage with the things that people are actually talking about?”

Make no mistake – it isn’t called Burning Church for nothing. The German bi-line is “Die Kirche brennt” – the church is burning. This is to be a positive forum, an exciting forum, a dynamic forum – but one that does not seek to hide from difficult questions and challenges but engages them with honesty and integrity.

Die Kirche brennt

I write this from a very biased point of view as have been involved (in a very minor and non-crucial way, though I did make the website) in the planning for the camp and I am huge fans of the people who are behind the main organisation – many of whom are in my church. What I love about this project is the energy, drive and positive thought that is pushing the camp forward.

I would also like to point out that, just because the people organising it also happen to be my bosses, I am not being paid to say nice things!

In a country where free and evangelical churches account for only around 1-3% of the population (exact figures are hard to pinpoint because the Austrian government doesn’t recognise churches such as the Baptist church as being official religions and so there are no population statistics), it is incredible for me to see the size, complexity and dynamism of the project.

Even more exciting is the fact that people have already been signing up from across Austria (and even further afield in Germany) from all backgrounds. Not just Baptist and evangelical backgrounds, but from the different Protestant state churches and even from the Catholic church. It is fun to watch the numbers of bookings rise as people catch the vision of what is going on.

The event is open to English speakers too – although the language of choice is unsurprisingly German, there is the ability to add in bi-lingual translation to the main events and most of the smaller events will have a multitude of people who speak perfect English. Therefore, if you are a young adult, or a young-at-heart adult, and you are looking for something interesting to do this summer that is a bit different, a bit provocative and a bit surprising, please do get in touch and I would love to hook you up.

The definition of accessibility is also changing, in my opinion. An accessible website used to just have to be accessible to visually impaired people with screen readers. Nowadays, however, we need to have our websites available for a variety of devices and screen sizes, including Android phones and tablets, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Blackberrys, traditional screen readers . . . and the list goes on.

I applaud and welcome this new enthusiasm for accessibility. After all, surely the idea of having a website that is accessible to as many people as possible is a gospel imperative – we should try and remove any barrier that stands in the way of people hearing the good news. Plus, a lot of what is good accessibility advice is just good code and good manners.

However, there are still some common problems that I see all over the place (and which I have no doubt been guilty of many times in the past). Some of these problems are old, some are new as a result of developing technology. I share them here in the hope that together we can covenant to avoiding them in the future and work towards a more accessible, welcoming future.

1) Incorrect use of HTML mark-up.

HTML is the language used to order information on the internet. At its most basic level, it tells the browser what ‘kind’ of content to expect – a title, a heading, an image, a hyperlink etc. With the advent of HTML5, this has become even more precise – you can now tell the web browser whether content is an address, a footer to an article, an overall footer, audio, a quote.

However, many people don’t spend the time they should over writing HTML or use software that writes bad HTML (such as Joomla, Dreamweaver or Frontpage). Not only does bad HTML reduce accessibility (it does), but it also often causes web pages to load slower, is worse for search engine optimisation and is often connected to poor styling.

One particular problem with incorrect HTML is a lack of information hierarchy. The way that HTML is written allows it to very precisely define the importance of information on a page. There is a clear title to a page, which defines what the page is. Then there are header tags (6 levels of them). The idea is that each page should have a 1st header tag (<h1></h1> in HTML) which gives it an overall heading. Then information broken down into a series of 2nd header tags (<h2></h2>), then 3rd header etc. For example, the title of this post is an H1 tag and all the numbered subtitles are in H2 tags.

Breaking up the information like this gives order. When we are reading a page, we can often see this order – bigger things are more important, smaller things are more into the details. Screen readers, however, can’t see things like this – they (and search engine spiders) rely on good HTML to tell them what is important and to communicate it.

Good accessibility starts with good HTML.

2) Failure to use ALT tags in images

Alt tags for images describe the image. If for some reason an image can’t be displayed (such as a user browsing at high contrast with images turned off, or using a screen reader because they are blind), it is the alt tag that will be read out. Therefore, it is important that these alt tags make sense and are meaningful (add to the message of the page).

It used to be that when I was in a rush, alt tags were always the first thing that I missed out – they took time to do well and didn’t seem to add any quantifiable benefit. Looking back, I feel pretty selfish doing this – I was excluding lots of people from my website unnecessarily.

3) Inappropriate use of Javascript

Javascript is a script language used on web pages to add interactivity. It is a programming language that has been around since the start of the web and which is used these days to do huge amounts of heavy lifting – everything from Google Search to Google Mail to Facebook to Twitter to GitHub relies heavily on Javascript.

Screen readers are getting better all the time at reading Javascript – many of the newest models can even interpret content which is added dynamically by Javascript. However, given the price of screen readers, you can’t always rely on users having the most up-to-date varieties.

If you can test your website with a visually impaired person or using a screen reader, that’s great. If not, work on the principles of degradable design (an old article now but one which is still good for the philosophy it brings) and make sure your website still works on some level, even when Javascript is turned off. If having Javascript turned off makes your website un-useable, you have a serious problem.

4) Using features without an accessible fallback

This is a big problem for websites – people choosing to use the latest and best features (or even just the easiest) and not thinking how these features work with people who can’t access them.

One of the biggest culprits is the CAPTCHA code – the series of letters and numbers in a box that you have to type in order to submit a web form. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I often find these impossible to read (and reCAPTCHA is by far the biggest culprit here in my opinion), imagine how these would be for people who are poorly sighted. Google often gets around this problem by including audio links that read out the letters. In my opinion, however, by far the better solution is just not to use them and find a better solution for controlling spam – Honeypots, for example.

This is just one example of a website feature that doesn’t generally have an accessible fallback – think of other features such as Google Calendars or sign-up forms. Research also suggests that sites that are accessible are generally easier to use for everyone, and therefore more popular overall. This isn’t hard to understand – just think of all the times that you have been getting annoyed at trying to fill in a tiny web form and work out whether the letter on the CAPTCHA is a 7 or a 1.

5) Locking content up in videos or audio without subtitles.

This is my number one bugbear at the moment – so many blogs think that simply posting a video will suffice as a blog post. As someone who still has full hearing abilities, I at least have the choice whether I want to view or not (nine times out of ten I simply skip over the post as I haven’t got the patience to sit through the waffle that comes with most videos). For people who are deaf, however, this content is completely inaccessible to them. The problem also exists with sermon audio posted online – deaf people are simply unable to access it.

If you are posting a YouTube or Vimeo video on your wall, please take the time  to write out a transcript to go with it, if it doesn’t already have subtitles. This makes your post nicer for search engines, friendlier for people who just like to skim through to get to the bit of content they’re interested in, and, crucially, actually accessible for deaf people.

Many churches won’t have the time or money to regularly transcribe sermons. However, if you know you have a lot of people in your congregation who are deaf, or you are a church of over say 150, I would say that it is an area that is vital to invest in. There are many agencies out there who transcribe audio for reasonable rates. Alternatively, you can probably find volunteers amongst your own congregation. Either way, I urge you to make this a vital area of development.

Finally, I would like to float an idea – would you be interested in a community driven website where churches could post audio that needed transcribing and people could volunteer their time to write out transcripts? If this sounds like something you would be interested in seeing, please add a leave a comment below.

That is why this post is essential: it could save you from falling into a search engine pitfall. If you are in charge of content or programming for a church website, you need to read this.

The myths

There are several particularly dangerous myths floating around about how best to make your site perform well in search engines, many of Google officially warn against in their guidelines. If you are using any of these tips, you risk getting seriously penalised or even banned from most major search engines.

• do not hide key words in a long list somewhere invisible on the page. Google has some incredibly powerful software and it will detect it. Over 5 years ago, for instance, BMW famously got banned from Google for doing this, and they definitely haven’t been the only ones.
• don’t stuff your content with the same key words or phrases over and over and over again. This might have worked back in 2007, but technology has moved on a lot since then and search engines now read context as well as individual phrases and weight pages accordingly.
• don’t try and use key words that have no relation to the content on the page. Again, Google wasn’t born yesterday and will notice.
• don’t spend ages stuffing your meta keywords tag. I can think of no big name search engine that relies on this (indeed, as far as I recall, it has been obslete the whole time I have worked and coded on the internet – nearly 8 years now!).
• there is no such thing as #1 on Google. Google have for several years now been using personalised searches – serving up each page of search results unique to each person. That means it is no longer possible to be ‘number one’ on Google. Run a mile from anyone who says it is (or, at the very least, don’t pay them to SEO your website!).
• do not try to buy links on websites linking to your website. This is against Google’s terms of service and is really very easy for an algorithm to spot. You’d be being dishonest and stupid, both at the same time. If you really, really want a link and have to pay, do it honestly and use a ‘sponsored link’ which is declared to be such underneath.

The realities

Instead of all the shady advice above, let me propose a few alternative hints to start you towards search engine optimisation – a ‘better way’, if you will. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how easy many of them are:

• do spend your time writing and creating great content that everyone wants to read. If your content is boring or badly written, forget trying to excel in the search engines and go and fix that. The web is social and people only share content they care about.
• do work on creating content hotspots on your website that make the browsing experience as easy as possible. The more people that instantly get what you are trying to write about, the more people sharing and caring.
• Remember – you are communicating information when doing church web design, not writing that stream of consciousness postmodern novel you always wanted to write.
• It’s about engagement. One of the biggest factors affecting Google ranking is people linking to your website. People link to your website when you have something interesting to say and you are saying it well. Focus on that, engage with your community and concentrate on building online networks. A lot of the rest will then look after itself.

I hope these myths and realities are helpful. Do you want to add anything. Have you got another hint you would like to share? Why not let me know in the comments section below. I would love to talk with you!

This short and simply guide aims to take the mystery out of the subject of church website images and give you confidence to make photos and pictures work powerfully for you.

1) Churches are made of people, not buildings

It sounds simple – and theologically we very rarely have a problem with this idea. However, if I had a pound for each time I saw a church website that had a picture of its building rather than its people on its front page, I would retired and living in Hawaii.

When people, especially new people, are looking at a church website, one of the things they want is the confidence to visit the church. One of the ways they get this is by seeing photos of real people. This tells the visitor that this church is full of normal people just like them. It’s often small things like this that make the difference between a visitor looking at the front page and them walking through the front door on a Sunday morning.

Photos of real people matter and make a difference. It’s what makes our church websites seem welcoming.

2) Grainy, blurred pictures without structure are worse than no pictures

Grainy, blurred photos suggest that a church doesn’t really care about the message that it is sending. It doesn’t care about seeming welcoming, it doesn’t care about making people feel at ease, it doesn’t care about seeming inclusive.

Now, this attitude may be true for some churches – but I bet it’s not true for yours. Take some time making sure the images are right, that they are of high quality, that they are well compressed – and that they are well composed.

If you have an art student or design student in your congregation (check your youth group, for instance) – ask them. Not only will you get them involved in the church, you will get good quality photos. And show them that their time is worth something to you by paying them a fair amount for their skills or taking them out to dinner (appropriately, of course).

Otherwise, do yourselves a favour and hire a professional photographer for a few hours on a Sunday morning to get some nice photos that you can actually use. It doesn’t pay to skimp.

3) What message are you sending through your pictures?

Think of how people look in your photos. Are they happy or sad? Smartly dressed or wearing more casual clothes? From which social background do they come? Do they look welcoming or judgmental?

These appearances all convey subliminal psychological messages to the people who look at your church website. Think about what message you would like to send, and what kind of people your church is seeking to attract, and choose your photos accordingly.

4) Using pictures of children and vulnerable adults.

One area that churches are often really scared about is the use of photos involving children or vulnerable adults. I am not a lawyer or a child safety expert, but here is my personal understanding of best practice:

• Obtain written and specific (for this purpose and at this time) consent from parents before taking photos of anyone under 18 years old that you will use in a website or other publication. Keep the consent form filed with the photos for future reference.
• Children under 18 should not be identified by name or other personal details (such as age, phone number, Facebook account or email address).
• Group photographs are preferable. If using single photos, do not give the names of the children out in captions.
• Be careful not to use names of children as image file names.
• Make sure that all clothing in the images is appropriate.
• Be careful using photos of adults from countries or backgrounds where being a Christian is politically sensitive – the internet is a big place and it could lead to problems in the future.

If you are in doubt, consult your denomination’s safeguarding expert or the Churches’ Agency for Safeguarding, both of which would be happy to help clarify any questions.

The moment that you mention one of these topics, people get very uneasy and shift uncomfortably in their seats. Therefore the following blog post is, in many ways, the evangelical equivalent of groping a girl behind the bike sheds at break time: I am going to talk about money. Fasten your seat belts, it is going to be steamy.

When I started web design 7 years ago, I was very aware that churches didn’t have a lot of money available and that budgets were very tight. Up until about a year ago, I priced my services accordingly – that meant that, in many cases, the amount I got paid did not reflect the amount of work I was putting in and the amount of experience and skill I was bringing to the table. I was so scared of not getting any work that I worked effectively for nothing – and my job satisfaction (and more importantly, the quality of my work) suffered because of it.

About a year ago, I had a rethink. My experience had started to suggest that, whilst budgets are tight, given the right project, the right vision and the right design solution, the money is often available to create a winning website. For those that don’t or aren’t willing to put up the money, then perhaps a web designer isn’t what they are looking for at this moment. Therefore, I significantly raised my prices – and discovered that, often, churches were still willing to pay.

However, I have often still discovered (and I know from friends who try to do creative work for churches and charities that they experience the same thing) that many churches object to anything more than a few hundred pounds and the implication has been made a few times that I am trying to rip them off. I have even had it suggested to me that, because I was working for God, I should work for nothing (I can only assume that God would start sending manna when I couldn’t afford to eat).

Therefore, I thought I would risk my eternal soul by tackling the forbidden topic of money and try and explain why I charge what I do.

A typical project

A typical church website for a typical church takes me between 30 and 50 hours to make, depending how efficiently the process happens and what level of experience the client has in web work.

Now, even just assuming that I was paid minimum wage under UK law (currently standing at £6.08), this would be between £180 and £300. And I’m sure that you would agree with me that a) churches should be uneasy about paying minimum wage anyway given many studies that suggest that this is not a living wage and b) web design skills are not minimum wage commodities.

However, let’s consider other things that I do in order to earn a living that I don’t get paid for but take up time:

• Time spent learning new skills, reading new ideas about best methodology in communication and web design and broadening my experience base. This all allows me to do my job by bringing professional, experienced skills to the table and therefore helping churches communicate.
• Time spent writing articles about good web design that help to resource and educate other churches and charities about best practices and attitudes in web design (serving the wider church).
• Time spent on voluntary programming projects like a church rota system or EasySermon, again resourcing and equipping other churches and helping them communicate the good news of the Kingdom of God.
• Time and money spent marketing myself, promoting my services and finding new clients.
• Money spent on buying software, a computer, web space, domain names, databases and other tools that simply allow me to do my job.
• Time spent researching and consuming great web design from industry experts, forcing me to raise my game.

Now, perhaps you are thinking ‘that’s all very well, but why should we have to pay for it’. Sadly, that’s the nature of freelancing. If I was working in an office, those sort of overheads would be taken care of by the business as a whole rather than all landing on my head, and so my pay check would represent that. However, as a freelancer, the only way I can do my job is by taking on those tasks myself – and these must be reflected in invoices. Furthermore, my ability to earn money is consistent on a steady stream of clients and therefore there is added uncertainty in the process.

Let’s imagine instead I was a freelance recording studio who wanted to serve churches and Christian artists by allowing them to record music, either worship music or simply music that rejoices in the creativity of human beings created by a Creative God. Here the expenses might be:

• Purchasing of equipment such as analogue to digital adapters, microphones, cables, compressors, DI boxes and speakers. This alone can be an initial purchase of upwards of £20,000.
• Time spent learning about recording techniques, wave forms, auto-tuning  and composition.
• Time spent learning specific software packages.
• Again, time spent marketing and finding new clients.
• Actual time in the recording studio – and then all the time afterwards editing and producing the album.
• Either time spent mastering the finished mix or subcontracting the mastering out to another freelancer (again, being keen if subcontracting that the subcontractor is also paid a fair wage).

You can see how the expenses soon add up? And yet, many churches still approach designers, artists and musicians with the view of wanting something for nothing.

I say this not because I want sympathy – I don’t. I say this because I think we as Christians need to start being honest and accountable about money.

It’s time for Christians and churches to start being honest and accountable about money & creativity.

When I charge (as I currently do) about £15 – £20 an hour on a project, it is because I also need to cover expenses such as the ones outlined above. Take those out, and I will be back near minimum wage pay. Therefore, I can assure you they are definitely not being spent on real estate in Barbados!

What’s more, these expenses mean I am able to offer churches the best possible skills, experience and therefore web design. More time spent on work that isn’t directly paid means a higher quality web design and better resourcing of the church of Jesus Christ.

What’s more, my prices are routinely significantly lower than secular equivalents, allowing churches who might otherwise not be able to get afford a good web design to get a stunning website and Christian presence online.

Web design is the main way I pay the rent, put food on the table, pay ever increasing University tuition fees (and believe me, they hurt) and hopefully be able to afford to get married fairly debt-free. I am also exploring a call to ministry and it is quite possible that income from web design would be the only way I would be able to begin to do that.

Therefore, I think we need a culture of openness about why creative prices seem so high to churches – it is the price we pay to get high quality web sites, records, pictures and music for churches that both are credible and take seriously what it means to be created in the image of a creative God.

Finally, I hope this has helped to explain to people who are considering hiring me what they would be paying for and why.

I am now going to stop talking about money, come out from behind the bike sheds and pray for my immortal soul.

That is why I am very excited to announce the latest project I have been working on: Easy Sermon.

In my experience, one of the things that churches particularly struggle with is finding an effective and easy way to upload and manage sermons on their websites. This is even more true when it comes to generating a podcast feed from these sermons for listening in programs like iTunes.

Easy Sermon takes a lot of the stress out of managing your sermons. It works alongside the popular WordPress software, which many churches are already using to enable less computer-sure staff upload content to websites.

The way it works is that it sets up a new category of item called ‘Sermons’. This works in exactly the same way as the Pages or Posts features of WordPress – there are boxes you type your content in and then you publish. The difference is that on the right hand side, there is an opportunity to upload a sermon file. Then, Easy Sermon does all the hard work for you, creating a sermon page and linking in the audio files.

As an added bonus, Easy Sermon also automatically creates you a podcast feed, allowing people to easy subscribe to your website and get the latest sermons.

The plugin is at an early stage of development – it is reliable but not yet very full of features. Therefore, if you think of something that will really help you whilst you are using Easy Sermon, let me know and I will be delighted to consider it for inclusion in the next version.

Until then, enjoy using Easy Sermon and let all your friends know about it!