Month: March 2003

Michael Boyink once again provides me with some good topical information. This time, it is a rather post entitled “Church Web Sites – What We Don’t Know” in which he enumerates discussion on three basic questions regarding your church or charity web site:

1. How Christians (and people interested in Christianity) Use the Web?
2. What a Church Web Site Should Be?
3. How To Measure the Success of a Church site?

I like these questions. They specifically remind me of an important question posed to me in my interview with Niphal Online:

Would you say that there is an understanding of the importance of the Internet in people’s lives? That this translates into a massive mission field? Do church leaders recognise this?

No, yes and no. One only need read the Pew Internet Project’s December 29, 2002 report in which asserts that most people expect to find the information they seek via online sources before any other. This means for those who are seeking to fill that “God shaped vacuum in every heart” identified by Blaise Pascal 150 years ago are turning to the net.

Unfortunately, the Church doesn’t understand that and not only misses on leading seekers to Christ, but losing believers to heresy, agnosticism and/or apostasy. Like every area of our lives, we are commanded not just to make converts, but disciples. Which means you can have all the slick Flash animation you want on the site, but if you’re all style and no substance than you may attract a seeker who’s prone to shiny things, but you’re not going to keep them.

This is reflective not only in the number of church web sites that haven’t been updated since the turn of the century, but also the lack of resource and time most churches fail to invest their web presence.

In other words, Mr. Boyink is dead on when he asserts that just like everything and everywhere else on the web “People are going to the web, and your church site, with a specific task to do, or question to answer — let’s forget about having to entertain easily-bored surfers.”

He later buttresses this point with an excellent example of why we waste our time and the time of those visiting our church web site by trying to turn it into an uber-portals chock-full of syndicated news feeds, and one of my pet peeves, the local weather when he writes:

What this unique content doesn’t include is the local news, sports, and weather. Given that to an individual web user the entire Internet is the same distance away, and takes the same effort to get to, there is just no good reason to give up your church’s valuable home page space to this type of content. Based on our knowledge of “direct driving” on the net, people wanting weather will go to weather.com – even if your feed is from weather.com. Weather from a weather site will be perceived as being more up to date, and more trustworthy than that same weather presented in the context of a church site. The average user is confused by the function of the home page button, for goodness sake – what do they know about dynamic syndicated content?

Basically what Boyink gets around to saying is that hits mean nothing, its about creating community and changing lives. I agree. On this site, we have examined several church web sites that have required healing because those creating it did not take time to ask the simple questions “who is my target audience?” and “how do I best serve them?”

Yo, Mike! That is so on target, I could kiss you on the lips for that one — though I’m sure you probably just prefer a well deserved “AMEN!”

This amusing note from dive into mark:

A representative for the company that makes PowerSiphon contacted me to correct my article on how to block spambots. I claimed that PowerSiphon was the spider with the User-Agent EmailSiphon. It is not. I have updated the article to retract my previous statement, and I apologize to the company for the mixup. You can draw your own conclusions about whether a retail web spidering product with a checkbox labeled “Extract email addresses” is a spammer’s tool, but it was not the specific tool I was seeing in my access logs.

Well, my feeling is that I would prefer any User Agent named “EmailSiphon” not visit my site. It’s probably a knee-jerk reaction on my part, but it is my opinion and I’m entitled to it.

I want to apologize for the lack of posting, and certainly being late with this great topic Mark Pilgrim had addressed this past Wednesday. I’ve been busy rebuilding a more usable Redland Baptist web site and it has consumed much of my free time. Don’t worry, I’m taking notes, and I intend to share them with the rest of you.

About a month ago, Vincent Flanders had emailed me. He was getting harvested hard by various spambots. I was reminded of that dialog when I read Mark Pilgrim’s 26-Feb-03 post entitled How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell. Here is what Mark said on his site — which sounded very similar to the original email I had received from Vincent:

I recently woke up to the staggering level of abuse occurring on this web site. This is old news to some, but we all wake up at different times. I’m talking, of course, about automated robots and spiders. They come at all hours, they take as much as they can, and they leave me with the (bandwidth) bill. They do so without respecting the Robot Exclusion Standard, now almost 10 years old. Some come to gather email addresses, which are then sold to spammers; some come to steal images or other content, and republish it without my consent; some come to spy on me and sell information to their clients about perceived violations of copyright, trademark, or some nebulous concept of brand identity.

None of them act in my best interest, or in the interests of my readers.

Can I hear an Amen? One of the biggest problems I’ve had with running a church web site, is pesky programs that rape and pillage the site for email addresses, sermons and images. Now mind you, I have no problem with a stranger who wants to copy one of Mark Adam’s sermons emailing me and requesting a copy for an upcoming Bible study. That’s why the information is out there free of charge. What I don’t like is ‘bots that come by and broadcast the latest pr0n to my pastors, or repackage and sell the sermon material in spite of our admonishion not to do so on in our Terms of Use. They’re crooks, so what’s breaking one more law? This is why I employ some anti-spam countermeasures — and have discussed them on THIS site.

And this is why I’m adding Mr. Pilgrim’s to the mandatory reading list.