1995 November 18
Gerry de Koning
I have produced an unofficial Web site for Knox Presbyterian Church, Toronto, since September 1995. Much of the contents is about events, doctrine, and the church's history. More needs to be added: the people of the congregation, evangelism, and just-for-fun material. It could be made more attractive with pictures, sounds, and video clips.
I have not seen much discussion of fundamentdal issues relating to church web sites: issues which need to be resolved as my site becomes an official organ of the church; issues which need to be resolved as more people become involved; and issues which should be discussed by as many church webmasters as possible.
I don't know the best forum for carrying on this discussion. For now I propose that people either mail me comments, or post to <news:soc.religion.christian>.
To help start ignite a discussion, in this note I share some thoughts about these pages and possible future directions.
To whom is your church Web page aimed? The following are some random, untested thoughts.
Who? Goal?
===================== ===============================================
Members Programme information. Evangelism help. History.
Internet Resource Links
Christian Students What kind of church are we? How to find us?
Materials to help defend the faith. Evangelism
help. Programme information. Links to real
people.
Christian Vistors What kind of church are we? How to find us?
Programme information. Aids to being
more comfortable during their first visit.
Non-christian students Evangelism. How to find us. Aids to being
more comfortable during their first visit.
Links to real people. Programme information.
Neighbours Basic information to help them know us a bit.
Evangelism. How to find us. Links to real people.
History. Community links. Aids to being
more comfortable during their first visit.
Programme information.
So far, I have produced the pages myself (with two pages maintained by someone else). As we move toward a team of people doing this, what should we look for in members of the team? What roles are there on this team? What kind of skills and inclinations should people have to fill each role?
Some ideas: a team builder/leader, a writer, a graphics artist/photographer, an HTML/computer specialist, a visionary, a wise person, an evangelist, and so on.
The Knox page is currently EXPERIMENTAL and UNOFFICIAL. My plan (already shared with the elders) is to have the page maintained by a few people responsible to the local evangelism committee.
One concern raised by some elders was that whatever is displayed publically as official church material should be reviewed by several people before being published. No single individual should speak unchecked for the church. This essentially means that the same rules as apply to the Sunday bulletin and the monthly magazine would also apply to the web pages.
I fully support the idea of review. First, we will catch more mistakes before publication. Second, we will discuss any sensitive issues before decisions are made. Alone I might be reluctant to do something, just to be sure. Or I may not be sufficiently sensitive to some issue.
Specific policy issues which need to be addressed include which groups participate in the church web pages, which external groups are "advertised" in the pages, and how exceptions are decided. This should be similar to how decisions are made about which announcements go into the Sunday bulletin, which posters go onto the notice boards, and so on.
I am reluctant to post any information which points to people at home. Thus, most requests for information should go through the church office, or someone's email address.
Furthermore, our church supports many missionaries around the world. Many are working in countries whose governments are or may become hostile to Christianity. We cannot jeapardize missionaries by identifying them on the world-wide, searchable Web. I've made exceptions in the case of those with an explicitly missionary presence on the Web, such as the staff of Campus Crusade who have web pages devoted to their work.
I am dead-set against publishing information such as "The single moms meet on Tuesday at Linda's home: 123 Anystreet, OurTown (111)222-333." The (Internet) world is full of immature and hostile people who could prey on Linda and her children.
I cannot say yet how our pages will be organized when things settle down. However, this is how I envision it at the moment:
At this stage, I do not know if we need multiple "Welcome" pages for different audiences. For example, should we advertise on the university campus and refer students and faculty to a "University Welcome page" different from the general welcome page?
I organize each page into four areas:
What am I dissatisfied about?
Timing. The content of the pages needs to be matched to the time available to update them. In my case, I update the pages once a month. I have seen church pages inviting people to a conference which happened six months earlier. We need to consider update timing and the energy this requires so we don't embarrass ourselves.
Directories and Indices. During September, I actively tried to get our URL into directories and search engines. The most important links (from what I can discover) pointing people to our pages are:
Links to other sites. I try to keep the links to other sites in our web pages to a minimum. First, there are much better directories and resource guides out there than I can ever maintain. Point to them, and don't compete. Second, every link needs to be checked monthly. Sites move, disappear, and mutate. How much effort are you willing to spend doing this?
Browsers. People are using many browsers to read Web pages, including lynx, a text-only browser. I test my web pages using 4 to 7 browsers on 6 different systems. No HTML editor or web-page-generator is perfect in today's environment; they all produce sub-standard pages OR pages which won't be readable on some browsers. So I still recommend involving someone who is prepared to become an HTML guru.
Monitoring usage. Here we find ourselves at the mercy of our Internet Service Provider (ISP). In my case, the information available is very good. I know, day by day, how many people have retrieved each page and the total bandwidth used (bytes transmitted). I also know all the sites which have retrieved my pages (again day-by-day).
Statistics. In our case, the Welcome page gets an average of 10 hits a day. The next most popular pages are Library, About Knox, and Special Events. Hits have come from as far away as Sweden, Israel, Australia, and Japan. Most hits come from Toronto (University of Toronto, Toronto Freenet, my ISP, and others). About 30 per cent of hits seem to come from non-graphical browsers.
Graphics. I've made graphics a minor part of the Knox pages. This is for three reasons: (1) competence (I'm no artist), (2) speed of loading pages to read (reader convenience), and (3) cost (over a threshold [which we are not even close to!] my ISP bills for volume transferred to Web readers) However, I'd certainly like more graphics than we have today!
Internet Service Provider. I recommend that churches use ISPs because: (1) Cost of the infrastructure. (2) Administration of the Web server, internet links, and so on. (3) Church computers are not directly linked to the net, and thus immune from "hacker" attacks. [This will reassure members who have heard that hackers can get into your computers and blow up your buildings.]
Internet Domain Address. Most churches will find it sensible to use their ISP's domain address. But, if you have your own domain name, your URL will not change when you change service providers. Given the instability in the Internet Services industry, this may be a consideration if processing a Web change-of-address is likely to be painful. For our church I would choose <knox.toronto.on.ca> rather than <knox.org> or <knox.net>.
Account Name. Many church web-masters are using their personal accounts to create web presence for their church. However, if that person transfers responsbilities to someone else, how easy is it to move the church's electronic address? An account for the church, administered by the current project leader, makes it easy to give the church staff and Web-site committee access to the account. And the address would likely be quite stable for a long time.
Other church and parachurch pages (a few well done pages):
Lists of churches
Web Publishing