Category: Theology

Here is some ageless advice I offered back in May of 2002:

One of the big problems I see with so many church websites are bloated graphics. Let me make this point very clear. Reducing the height and width attributes of the <IMG> tag does not, I repeat DOES NOT, physically reduce the physical size of the file. Nor does it reduce the size of the image via “color reduction.” We’re talking the minutes versus seconds difference your users suffer to download a 50kb image of your pastor versus one that’s 1/10th the size but still portrays the same subject.

I have a running joke with the pastor of my church. With no coordination at all, he often cites Scripture and or theological points that I just made an hour prior in my 11th Grade Sunday School class. At the end of the service, I always take time to thank him for making me look like as stinkin’ genius. Though we all really know that is the same Spirit working through different members.

Well it seems I’ve been similarly blessed with validation from none other than usability and marketing guru, Vincent Flanders where he wrote in his Father Flanders’ Sermon for Sunday, July 13, 2003:

Just because Jesus miraculously turned water into wine doesn’t mean he can miraculously turn your 1280- x 1024-pixel image whose file size is 1.8Mb into an image whose file size is only 74Kb just because you changed the WIDTH= and HEIGHT= attributes to WIDTH=”420″ and HEIGHT=”336″.

This mistake is so common that it’s beginning to be as annoying to me as the confessions of the students of the young men of my Jesuit high school were to Father Ambrose “For your penance say three Hail Mary’s” Forsthoefel.

Just from a theological point of view, Jesus was and is capable of all sorts of miracles. That point aside, Vincent is VERY correct in that we should not expect Divine Intervention for bloated images that can easly be corrected with a little software and a little know-how. Vincent offers some good freeware/shareware options in his article.

And just in case you’re not convinced … I did a quick search of my past church web site reviews. Here are a few in which this ‘big problem’ was duly noted. Some have since changed their sites. Some have not. Pray for them.

• St. Louis Catholic Church, Alexandria Virginia (warning, images so large it can crash your browser)
• Ho-ho,oh-no! Valley Fellowship, Huntsville, AL (lots of good examples of bad graphic technique)
• Whitfield Baptist Church Dalton Georgia (site has dramatically changed, but check out the chrome title banner, and the Bible graphic)
• What does it mean to Color Reduce?

If you’re not making backups of your website, and if you’re not making copies of those backups somewhere other than your server, then here’s something that might scare you into it:

The The Register reports that a defacement contest is in the works and will likely to target Web hosting firms.

scheduled for Sunday is likely to target Web hosting companies rather than individual Web sites.

note to self:

• send email of article to host provider
• make a backup of sites tonight
• make sure copies of backups are FTP’d to home computer and are burninated to a CD
• make copy of CD and put in saftey deposit box

Yes, a bit extreme, but think about it. If your backups are located on or near your network or web server, then they’re going to be next to impossible to restore when some hacker wipes them out along with your site.

Oh yes, and this is one of the reasons why I pay about $12/month for a reseller service, so my web site is hosted on a computer somewhere in New Jersey, while I’m here in Maryland.

That said, I’m old school enough to burn CDs and move them out of the house. Better to burninate and not need the backup, then to get wiped out and have none.

I wanted to clarify a point I made earlier today, I posted the daytime version of a house in my neighborhood in which the Spirit of Christmas is mistaken with animated light-up snowmen and flashing lights. Much the same way some churches mistake animated spinning crosses and ‘Flash’ing text for content. Don’t Do This!

You may think its neat. Your pastor may think its neat. But your visitors are going to get frustrated, irritated or not take you seriously and move on the next church site down the block. Similarly, you are likely to find existing church members will ingore the site altogether. If nothing else, remember that content is king!

You can click on this image to see just how much light was flooded into my camera, to the point I didn’t even need a flash or a tripod! But before you call over your co-worker, ask yourself, “does my church website look this house?”

Of course the question my wife wants to know is , “where do they store all that stuff?” You’ll see what I mean when I take a picture of the same house round-about Easter-time.

We I have a saying around here at HealYourChurchWebSite.com:

Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should!

Which is what I think of whenever I drive by this house in my neighborhood who’s excessive decorations remind me of many  church  web  sites that tend to trend towards contrivance instead of content (although I do have to admit, there is a part of me that finds it comforting to see a well-armed toy soldier protecting the newly born baby Jesus).

Go ahead and click on the image for a (much) larger view of this atrocity … if you dare.

Please open your copy of ‘The Book‘ to pages 264 and 265. There you will see me disparaging those persons who break my browser by using Javascript to disable my right key click. You may also notice a link to a web service I wrote for Vincent’s site that gets around this stupidity.

Any web servant who has taken the time to read Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility should understand the evils of breaking your user’s browsers by disabling various functions they expect. For example, I expect to be able to right click so I can open a new window. Yet there are those web servants out there who’s ego and/or paranoia are such that they just assume everyone who right clicks is out to steal. Well thank you very much for bearing a false testimony against your brother!

What I personally find ironic is that most, if not all such sites are so poorly coded, it’s not even worth looking at the source or right-clicking the links using the SamSpade Safe Browser. Nor is it worth a second trip back to the site.

About the only thing worse than this are those right-click nazis who also use the target= argument for their hyperlinks to throw open a new window – which inadvertently breaks the functionality of the back button.

Not convinced? Perhaps an article entitled ‘Don’t Disable Right Click!‘ by Rosemarie Wise will change your mind.

When this site opened, I promised everyone that I would critique sites both good and bad, using the former as examples to follow, the later as examples to avoid – and perhaps to gently instruct the errant web servant of that site back into the fold of good web design.

Obviously, I’ve been putting this off, in small part due to the crash, in greater part because I had not listed my criteria. Judging without a standard is about as bad as designing a site without a plan. And we all know what God says about judging others …

So here are the standards by which I myself am willing to live up to (on my church websites) … I hope you are too:
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“Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do
not fight like a man beating the air.” – I Cor. 9:26

Imagine running a marathon, or stepping into a boxing ring blindfolded? Unless you are used to being visually impaired to the degree of legal blindness, this would be a pretty stupid thing to do. Yet this is exactly what I see happening with so many church websites today. They, like many under-funded endeavors, have felt the pressure to present a web presence, but without the benefit of careful planning.

Instead, …
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