Heal Your Church WebSite

There’s no getting around it, despite the efforts of many to teach, rebuke, correct & train in righteous web design, there still exists a great cloud of witlessness when it comes to the Church’s presence online. A fact painfully corroborated by the persistent body of ‘kitsch‘ out there that distracts, annoys and otherwise drives-away people seeking and/or serving the Lord.

WHOOOOSH - flame on!

I should know, as I’ve been engaged in mental combat with these forces of evil web design idioms since the turn of the new Millennium, first in collaborating with Vincent Flanders on his second book, an act which lead to the eventually May 2002 establishment of Heal Your Church Website.

But enough of my credentials, lest I start this post start sounding like a Pauline epistle, though I should probably mention that I do the software as a service thing for a living … but that’s plenty about me, as others equally qualified have since dashed headlong into the breach.

This would include Cory Miller and James Dalman at Church Communications Pro (CCP), the latter of whom begged the all important question: “Is Church marketing dead?” Specifically, pondering aloud:

“There is something going on but I quite can’t put my finger on it. It’s a gut feeling that’s right more often than not. I think the church landscape is drastically changing and that church as we know it now is going to evolve (no, I am not supporting Darwin) into something much different. It’s just a hypothesis or idea I’m working on, whatever that’s worth.”

To which my response is: “James, let me save you a few steps. Church marketing isn’t dead, it’s just stuck on stupid!”

If that weren’t the case, why would sites and services such as CCP, Church Marketing Sucks, For God’s Sake Shut Up, and a handful of others continue to, and with apologies to Vincent Flanders, offer weekly lessons in good church marketing by looking at examples of bad church marketing?

I mean, how many examples of church websites adorned with the cliché gold lamé animated gif of a spinning cross that screams “everything I know about website design I learned from Strong Bad!“ do we need to ‘Fisk‘ to make our point?

Or on a more serious note, how many of us seen all to many unique local churches dive through the porpoise-driven hoops of Warren-ology just to become different like everyone else?

And that’s really my point, it’s not that church marketing is dead, it is that we’re stuck on driving down the wide and easy path to church marketing, rather than seek out a difficult path that includes:

• Studying Scripture to see where marketing and evangelism intersect;
• Teaching lay staff and church on what real marketing is and how it works;
• Understanding that the Church didn’t start in 2000, but rather 2000 years ago;
• Putting aside the need to agree 100% with everyone 100% of the time;
• Initiating marketing teams as opposed the message controlled at a single point;
• Daring to be different without amputating one’s self from the Body.

Look, we have centuries of beautiful sacred songs, art and literature as the result of the artistry that was once the Church’s … why can’t we have the same for church marketing in the 21st century?”

Or put another way, Franky Schaeffer was right when he asserted that Christians are no longer influencing society through various forms of media, but are instead influenced BY it. A neat trick when you think Francis Shaeffer’s son warned us about this as far back as 1981!

WHOOOOSH - flame off!

Oh, and before I forget, to my Eastern Orthodox friends … a belated Χριστός Ανέστη!

Last night while listening to various speculations as why the horse that ‘placed’ at the Kentucky Derby was put down, my mind drifted to 5 things Eight Belles has in common with many church webmasters I know, including:

1. Both endure through arduous training regimes;
2. Both have blinders, bridles, and bits forced upon them;
3. Both are ridden hard, often with tightly held reins;
4. Both get whipped as they approach the finish line; and
5. Both are often “put down” instead of retired or rehabilitated … though a good race horse at least has the hope of being put out to stud if they can survive without injury.

Brutal huh?

Yeah, sorry with the negative waves Moriarty, but I think what we’re dealing with has its basis in a somewhat larger quartet of problems that afflict the Christian church on the whole, they being:

• turf wars
• shooting the wounded
• treating those who leave like traitors
• non-Biblical power structures

Don’t get me wrong, any organization of people are going to suffer the effects of the sin nature; including the Church until Christ returns.

Still, my heart goes out to a good number of church webmasters who have privately emailed me with their stories of how shabbily they were treated somewhere along the process of designing, developing, deploying and/or maintaining a church website.

Heck, I’ve gone through it a bit too - having been verbally tongue-lashed by a church staff member publicly in the kitchen of the church (next to the sanctuary) before my last communion service there, followed up by a webmaster who couldn’t wait to “upgrade” the site from MovableType to FrontPage.

That aside, I tend to want to keep such communications private as I minister to a hurting church webmaster. I have though from time to time, both either with the permission and/or at the request of the pummeled programmer published their tale not in the spirit of bitterness nor gossip, but as experiences from which we can all observe, learn and hopefully avoid in the future.

Here are a couple of links to such posts:

• Submissive Volunteerism versus Spiritual Abuse
• Mike Boyink on the problem with free ice cream
• Mr. Zeldman meet Mike Boyink, one of ‘The New Samaritans’
• Volunteerism and the Robert E. Peary Class of 1977 Reunion

As I alluded earlier, much of this has to do with our struggle with our sin nature, much of that manifesting itself in what is commonly referred to these days as ’spiritual abuse.’ There’s plenty on this topic all over the internet, but I am partial to the excellent writing on this malady that are found at Watchman.org:

• Profile: Spiritual Abuse defined
• Beating the Sheep by David Henke
• Watchman.org - Elements of Spiritual Abuse

This isn’t to say we should engage ourselves in the process of providing our valuable skills to assist a church and/or charity create and maintain an excellent web presence , but only and rather that we do so keeping in mind the following words of our Savior from Matthew 10:16:

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

What about you, what are your thoughts, experiences, and/or opinion on this topic? Leave a comment, in love.

Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. While this aphorism is very worn, it is also very true. Here are some simple things you can do with mysqldump, crontab, tar/gzip and a little contingency planning to insure you don’t lose your sanity when your server crashes upon the shoals of of virtual disaster.

Check out these recent tales of real-life virtual horror as told by a variety of news sources from around the globe:

• The outgoing Italian government posted the entire population’s tax returns on the internet causing a mad scramble which crashed the system.
• Obama supporters were in for a surprise Monday when an attacker executed code on Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign Website that redirected users to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign site.
• According to police reports, a computer was stolen from the ADT Home Security branch on Sunbeam Center Drive sometime between April 12th and April 13th.
• Tens of thousands of people were feeling short changed last night after a massive system failure wiped out all the Northern Bank’s ATMs.
• A statewide computer problem again hobbled the state’s digital driver license system on Friday.

The point is, hardware failures, power outages, software bugs, stolen computers, cross site scripted SQL injections, and/or zombie induced denial of service attacks can all turn your church and/or charity website into a tub of techno-mush quicker than you can recurse a binary tree.

The only real defense against such failures is to plan for them - anticipating them in three ways:

• backing up your data
• moving your backed-up data off site
• having and practicing how to restore backed-up data

Here’s a very simple snippet from an oldie but goldie article entitled “How to backup your MySQL tables and data every night using a bash script and cron:”

#!/bin/sh
# backup data
mysqldump -uroot -ppwd –opt db1 > /sqldata/db1.sql
mysqldump -uroot -ppwd –opt db2 > /sqldata/db2.sql
# zip up data
cd /sqldata/ 
tar -zcvf sqldata.tgz *.sql
# email data off-site
cd /scripts/
perl emailsql.cgi

The article also displays a script on how to email the data off site, not a bad deal if your data is small - such backups being just as simple to restore with this dynamic command line duo of directives:

tar -zxvf sqldata.tgz
mysql -uroot -ppwd db1 < db1.sql

Things get trickier when you have tons of data, in which it may play into one’s restoration plan better to backup and restore a database by individual tables. Here is a set of articles that describes how to do this that includes some script examples you can modify to suite your needs:

• MySQL: How do I dump all tables in a database into separate files?
• MySQL: How do I import individual table dump files in to MySQL using shell script?

Either way, then it is just a manner of putting the shell script on a timer, or in the vernacular of crontab:

1 3 * * * /usr/home/mysite.com/prvt/tbak.sh > /usr/home/logs/tbak.log

If either of these shell script, bash-based approach seems to complex then perhaps one of the control panel, web-based method offered by UpStartBlogger’s post “8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others)” will do the trick.

Here are some other related articles that might help, the last two include automagic date stamping of the backup files:

• MDLog:/sysadmin - Backup your MySQL databases automatically with AutoMySQLBackup
• Automatic MySql Backup Script - Dagon Design
• Justin-Cook - Automatic cPanel backup (domain & MySQL) with cron & PHP
• Simple MySQL Backup - Holy Smoly
• DreamHost Forum - Crontab/backup

The bottom line is this: just Peter implores us to make a ready defense in 1 Peter 3:15, so I’m asking you always be ready to make a defense to anything that endangers the data that is on your system so you’re not found tearfully dissheveled cowering in a corner meek and fearful, mumbling something about how you should have planned for such failures.

You’ll be glad you did - probably at the most inopportune time possible.

Want to make sure your church website follows the principles of good church website design? Then stop coding that rotating Flash banner you think is cook and start learning how user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful websites with high conversion rates.

The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and WordPress 2.5 has been ‘in the wild’ for a couple of weeks. These factors, and the fact that my own blog is getting a bit crufty has me thinking it is time for yet another Heal Your Church Website do-over. That and I’ve been getting some […]

Steve Ballmer says Vista is a work in progress. With that in mind, and if my office, contact management, presentation, web administration, and other applications are all web-based, then what is the value proposition of sticking it out with Microsoft’s expensive work in progress, versus a more cost effective work in progress such as Ubuntu?

I realize, understand, and respect the Catholic tenant that their faith is built upon a combination of Scripture and historic tradition. That said, there’s no reason the Vatican website should continue to ineffectively rock like it’1999. With that in mind, here are 5 things I’d do to enhance the Holy See website to better publicize and describe Pope Benedict XVI’s April 15-21, 2008 Apostolic Journey to the United States of America and visit to the United Nations Organization Headquarters:

What could be more ironic than to receive an email from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on the topic of “Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages” that links to a page that throws a 403, permission access denied page?-) Fortunately for you, I got screenshots, followed by some commentary on the article once the good folks at UseIt.com realized the error or their ways.

With more church webmasters taking advantage of free, one-click installs provided by inexpensive web hosting solutions, I figure it is time to provide a quick tutorial on how to harvest useful operational, user and security information the error logs using a variety of commands already at your disposal - free.

For what will it profit a man if his church website is the slickest in the Internet if he has to forfeit a month’s collections just to change the welcome message? If you haven’t guessed by the play on Matthew 16:26 (&/or Mark 8:36, &/or Luke 9:25), or the somewhat wordy “bad church web design poster #006,” the topic of today’s “sermonette” is website maintenance.

Multiple column, table-less layouts using CSS isn’t so hard the CSS Grids Builder tool provided as part of the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library. Just enter the number of columns, the widths and positions, and presto - a very small XHTML footprint driven by some rather clever formatting wrapped-up into a nicely compressed cascading style sheets is your for the taking … free!

What is it with fundamental, KJV only, pre-millennial, independent Baptist churches and web design that wants to party like it’s 1999? Case in point, the website for the Faith Baptist Church of Dayton Ohio.