If Jesus Had A Website

As I've been following the story of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who converted from Islam to Christianity and was arrested and faced with the death penalty, it suddenly occurred to me how some stories in the news can be very useful in discussions about faith. However, many times these discussions aren't very good for use on the pulpit, but can be great for discussion through the church's website.

Now, to facilitate this discussion, there are a number of options. You can simply post a set of links to relevant articles and allow discussion to arise from them, or if you have a message board on your site you can start threaded discussions about the articles there. If you just want to provide "food for thought", you can always have the pastor or other responsible party write a brief commentary on the topic.

Sometimes we miss out on opportunites to show people how their faith applies to real-life situations, and by bringing these stories to their attention through your website, you can help show how relevant their faith is through the examples of others. After all, with all the other news out there, it can be easy to miss the spiritual significance of most of the news.

Just a few QuickLinks this morning to provide you with some more food for thought when it comes to your church website (this also happens to be much of my daily reading list):

• The Appian Way – Thoughts on using technology to spread the gospel.
• Blog Ministry – About web evangelism and ministry through blogging.
• Church Marketing Sucks – One of the more more popular Christian sites on the net, pushing the envelope on how and why we should better clarify the truth of Jesus Christ.
• Christian Web Trends Blog – From the web host and designer OurChurch.com, this blog is a relatively new addition to the Christian Webmaster community.

So if you're looking for some other places to get ideas for your church website, there's a few to get you started. Of course, If Jesus Had A Website will always be here with new ideas as well!

Over the past few years, one of the growing trends with blog-style sites has been the Podcast. Basically, the podcast is like a radio show that is shared over the internet and can be played at almost any time. In the case of the church, the podcast can be a sermon recorded and made available on the church website.

Now, some people may worry that making their sermons available through podcasting may lead to a replacement for attending church. While this may happen in a few cases, most of the time the podcast can be used to give visitors to your church website a "sneak preview" as to what your church is like. Through the podcast, visitors can check out your pastor's or pastors' preaching style and approach. It's almost a small kind of advertisement as to what your church is all about.

Secondly, the podcast can be very useful for keeping your church family together. For those with jobs who require them to miss the occasional service, they can keep up with sermon series or even announcements at your church. Even for those who are bound to their homes, such as the elderly, the podcast can be used to bring them the weekly sermon, either through the technology available to them in their homes or the sermons can be put on tape or CD and brought to them by anyone with access to the podcast.

As you can already see, the podcast can be a very powerful tool for your church website. For more information on podcasting, I encourage your to check out the following:

• Podcasting: helping the church move at the speed of technology
• Podcasting Your Church

In general, there are two approaches to displaying the events that are going on in your church: the calendar and the list. I've used each of these methods before, and each has it's pros and cons. In order to help you decide what is best for your church website, here's a little about each from my experiences:

• Calendars: Calendars can be a great way of showing what is going on in your church. However, many online calendar tools can be difficult and unwieldly, or the good ones can be very expensive and you still might not get all the features that you want. The manual updating of calendars will take up a lot of time and will need to be updated frequently so that they don't get out of date. Another thing I've noticed is that calendars work better in larger churches where there are a lot of regular activities going on. In a small church where there is little more than a Sunday service and a weekly Bible Study going on, a calendar tends to look bare.
• Lists: Lists are very simple and striaght-forward tools for keeping your congregation on the up-and-up. I personally like to keep two lists of events: one for regular events that rarely change, and one for one-time events that come up occasionally. In these cases, I have a list that I can manually change as needed since the items don't change very item, and then I have a list I can use with a database where the changes can come quite frequently. Even if I didn't use a database, I'd have the two that I could keep and display seperately. I also it's easier to keep the regular activities on the main page of the site and then keep the other announcements on a separate page if need be. However, in a very large church, both these lists may become large an almost unmanageable.

As you can see, there is a place for each approach. Calendars tend to work well in situations where the information needs to be condensed as much as possible, but lists work better when there isn't as much information to manage.

One last note I'd like to share is that I've found is that people seem to plan better with calendars when they can see the dates laid out in front of them. With lists, people don't necessarily associate the date listed with a day of the week or month, and they can forget a single event if the actual date is not reinforced with them on several occasions. With this in mind, you may find that an approach using both lists and calendars to some extent may be best for your church.

Either way, the most important thing is to make sure that the dates are out there and available!

For a class that I am currently taking, I was required to read a book called Wired for Ministry by John P. Jewell. While, I admit that I did not read the entire book, I did read enough of it to recommend it to anyone who wants to consider the ramifications of using technology in a ministry setting.

This book helps you to evaluate the different ways that your church is using technology by asking the right questions. Technology can be used to strengthen, encourage, and build up the Body of Christ, or it can tear down relationships through impersonal communication. As far as this relates to your church web site, the information that you post can be sending many messages about the church that you may not realize. For instance, if you post a picture of your church building on the homepage, someone could think that the building is the most important part of your faith. Or if the website is rarely updated, then it could send the message that nothing is going on ever at the church. While these examples may seem silly, they could not be further from the truth. Technology has the potential to do many wonderful things for ministry, but with that potential comes many great dangers. I would like to encourage any church to read Wired for Ministry before begining a website, installing a wireless network in the church, or using powerpoint in a worship service.

I'd like to welcome Wade Apel as a contributing member of IfJesusHadAWebsite.net. Wade has the unique fortune of holding a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and is about to complete a four-year stint at Lutheran Theological Seminary Southern. His background has left him with a unique perspective on technology and it's role in the church which I believe that most church webmasters will find invaluable.

I recently undertook a big project here at If Jesus Had A Website and converted the entire site into a CSS layout from a tables-based layout. You may have noticed a few minor changes, but by and large the appearence has changed very little.

You may wonder why I took the effort to do such a project when it had very little effect. The truth is that it had a much more dramatic effect than you may realize unless you've worked extensively with CSS.

As for myself, I have been working in web development for a number of years now, and I had always been partial to using tables for layout. They were simple, direct, and easy to do layout in for most basic tasks. However, as I became more serious about web design and taking on more complicated projects, I learned a few things about CSS that eventually made me make the change.

The first thing was that, when implemented correctly, CSS will provide better cross-browser layout consistency. This doesn't even mention the fact that it follows restrictions better as well. I can't tell you how many times I've had a table resize itself because text or an image was too large, leading to a complete foul-up of the layout. But along the lines of the cross-browser consistency, for all widths with percentage values the actual values are calculated by the browsers (often on-the-fly). Unfortunately, there is no consistent standard for these calculations. This means that if you put width="80%" in a nested table item, some browsers will calculate this as 80% of the width of the parent item (the table element your new table is in) and some browsers will calculate this as 80% of the width of the browser window. Needless to say, these yield much different results.

Secondly, CSS can allow you to arrange your content in a way that is more optimal for text readers and search engines. In both cases, it allows you to place your main content in your file before menus and blocks. With this site, I can list all of my articles before the menu and other blocks.

Why is this important? For text readers, which are often used for the blind who go online (the text is pulled out with the html tags stripped, and then "read" to the blind surfer with special software), so it puts the items that they are looking for front-and-center. However, with tables, things need to be presented in a certain order, so that leads to the text reader going through a bunch of garbage before getting to your content.

Similarly, search engines tend to weigh their results most heavily on the first part of the page they encounter, and, similar to the text readers, they strip out many of the html tags. Therefore, we want to get our main content as close to the top of our page files as possible to get the most accurate results.

Third, CSS provides so many layout options that its flexibility cannot be overlooked. Chances are, if you have a layout in mind, then there is some way to do it using CSS. Even now, shortly after doing my changes, I wonder why I was using tables in the first place when so many of the things I wanted to do could be done relatively easily in CSS.

Lastly, I just want to leave you with a few CSS layout resources to get you started if you've never used them before. These are a great base to build from:

• Max Design has several very good and straight-forward tutorials.
• CSS Creator is a tool that can help get your basic layout in order.
• A List Apart has a number of useful articles about various uses of CSS that can help you find new or better uses of CSS.