The Welcome Mat
Remember, you're writing about this great group of people you get together with to worship this amazing God. You're not writing a business plan. A sense of humor, enjoyment of life and light-heartedness helps show that there are real, interesting people behind that website, maybe even a church of them worth visiting.
Search engines
Use Google.com to find up to date articles about how Search Engines Work. It is the key to getting visitors to your pages. Most people search for a topic using a phrase. If your title, description, or keywords, contain that precise phrase, your page may go to the top of the list. So try to anticipate possible search phrases that people might use in relation to that page and somehow work them into the title, description, keywords and indeed body text. (In the keyword list, such a phrase must have no commas between the words.) You can make it very much more likely that people will find your page.
SearchEngineWatch has a section with links to pages which will show you (some in real time) what search words people are using online. As you might expect, Christian words are not among them, but everything else is.
Do you agree?Remember the definition 'a virtual noticeboard', on my opening screen, explaining what our role is on the Internet. We are trying to give what our visitor wants - simple navigation, a sense of security, easy and intuitive processes, lots of help, great attention � a comfortable, familiar, delightful browsing experience!
However, it needs to be clearly understood what information you want to be available. This has to be the first thing you think about, right from the start, and is usually the most difficult issue to get right.-
The only address and phone number mentioned are those of the Church Office. If the phone goes directly to a clergy member, do not list it.
- The only Email addresses shown are those of Senior Clergy, and of the WebMaster, both like getting 'Approving' mail.
- Clergy wives and children are 'private', avoid their photographs or other details.
- Clergy residences are not identified. Our Australian society has trained Welfare Providers, and our churches support them, but do not replace them.
- Include the Web site URL on every page, and include your country in the Postal address.
Now divide the list
You had many folk searching the Internet, recording their search words, looking at Web sites and listing items they discovered. Join all the lists together, grouping in topics.
Choose the three or four 'must do' items and put them in List 1.
The next few go into List 2 - to be implimented after List 1.
I think 3 stages of development are enough to plan for. After all, we are planning on being Only Beginners. Leave the 'Hard Stuff' to next month, when your Programmer gets her/his second wind.
Colour Schemes
This is a big subject. I made this Colour page to help myself select colour schemes, using the 140 named colours. (Yes, Australians spell it with an 'u'.) There are 216 Browser safe colours known by their Hex codes. Look at my notes. Visit the sources VisiBone for their colorlab graphics. I was still not happy, and found a javascript that lets me see fine variations.
Don't be too intimidated
Copied from CentralPC
Most of all, don't be too intimidated by the whole website design thing.
Sure, making an amazing site takes work, thought, time and skill, but you can build that skill yourself as you go. You do what you know how to do the best you can at that time. As you learn new things that will improve the site, you apply them. Links found via CentralPC are
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/bookshelf/thumma_article3.html, and
http://www.wilk4.com/links/links2.htm, and
http://www.ginghamsburg.org/cybermin/
Test before going to Air
If you have something worth saying, put it up the best you can for now and improve it when you can. However, if a test group of your church members cannot use the site effectively, where does the blame lie?
It seems obvious that users are not to blame. No matter how poorly they perform in using the site, logic dictates that if they cannot use a site designed for them, the fault therefore lies in the design. The only solution is to redesign the site, since the audience cannot be modified.
Spirit-led
Do not be deterred by the fact that your church is the first to develop an idea. There lies true inspiration, and leadership by our all-skilled Holy Spirit.
A gathering of points
Web pages provide a one-on-one situation.
The Web is a stack of pages which display one after the other.
Graphics should be small. Code the WIDTH and HEIGHT, add an ALT description.
Optimize your HTML by removing excess spaces, comments, tags and commentary, especially on your home page, to minimize file size and download time (the files are harder for humans to read after many of the spaces are removed).
The Web is an interactive hypermedia communications medium that your Web site should reflect. Allow your visitors to interact with your site
It's not a site, it's not a visit - it's a service, it's an experience.
Remember the eight-second rule. Visitors have eight seconds worth of patience while waiting for your pages to load.
Show personality when the first screen from your web site appears
Design with the user in mind.
Make your site easy to learn.
Don't forget to run spell check one last time before publishing.
Enable visitor feedback.
We are running a visitor center, give people a reason to visit.
Be visually cohesive.
Provide relevant content.
The key to good design is to ask yourself what the members of each target audience are looking for when they visit your website. Potential visitors to your church probably want to know:
Is this church weird, or do normal people go as well?
What do Christians believe? Why do people go to church?
Where is the church? How do I get in touch?
What times are the services? Which service should I go to?
Are there facilities for children?
It reminds me of the old TV joke on the Inventors programs -
Does it come in other colours?
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