This is the fifth in a series of key concepts for your site that should help to make it a better place for all those involved.

Often times when we design websites, we are looking to make the most appealing look that we can. Sometimes, that involves a lot of images, content (written, audio and video) and/or various scripts. When pieced together, they can make a wholesome and vibrant home for your church on the web.

However, sometimes we web designers can forget to evaluate the efficiency of our sites. Everything we put on our sites takes up space and needs to be downloaded by visitors. While many web designers have the luxury of broadband access, statistics show that more than half the time the visitors to our site will still be using some form of dial-up access (and yes, the statistics are a few years old, but you'll still have a large percentage of visitors using dial-up).

Because of this truth, we must make sure we make our pages are optimized for all visitors. While one visitor may be using broadband and have to wait three seconds for a page to load, that same page may take more than 15 seconds to load via dial-up. For many people in today's demanding world, that's long enough for them to move on to the next option. Don't let them pass you up!

Here's a few tips to keep you site loading as fast as possible:

• Use text links wherever possible instead of images.
• Save all your images in a "web quality" format instead of the highest quality available. This will help keep the size of your images small.
• Check your web page performance using a free tool like Silktide's Sitescore or Dr. Watson.
• Keep the size of your included files (CSS and JavaScript in particular) as small as possible as well, as they can otherwise be easy to overlook.

Always remember that your church website is a reflection of your church. If your site visitors enjoy their experience on your site and it performs well, that is a positive reflection on your church and leaves a good impression with the visitorm Do your best to make the visitors experience as trouble-free as possible!

This is the fourth in a series of key concepts for your site that should help to make it a better place for all those involved.

There are few things more frustrating than not being able to find the information you need, whether it's sports scores or meeting times. On a website, sometimes its frustrating because you have to click a lot of links before you get to where you want, while other times you can't find what you need because it's been combined with too much other information on a single page. Somewhere there is a middle ground where your website is most effective.

However, finding that middle ground is not an easy process. It takes careful consideration and an understanding of your site's visitors. Some things think about are:

• Layout or Template - Is your site presented in an organized and easily readable manner? (If you need some new ideas for your site's look, you can try here and here.)
• Information Structure - Make sure that the information that is most generally needed is the fewest clicks away. On your church website, that should mean that items like your address, phone number, denomination, service times, and upcoming schedule events should all be priorities on your main page. Don't forget a short blurb about the kind of place your church is along with an invitation, which is a great tone setter for your site.
• Clear Link Labels - Make sure that the links on your site are clearly labeled. People are less likely to click on a link if they don't know where it will take them. So even if your youth group has a catchy name, try making the link just "Youth Group" so visitors know what it is. And don't try to use images as symbolic links (like a picture of children for "Children's Ministries"), because it may not even be evident that the image is a link.
• Try An HTML Site Map - No matter how you organize your link structures, there's a good chance that a number of people will be looking for things in places other than where you put them. If you have a site map page with all your key links together, then it's one more way for a visitor to easily find what they need.

A well-organized website makes a visitors experience more enjoyable, so its well worth the extra effort. Take the time to get your site in order, and you will find it well worth your while.

 

This is the third in a series of key concepts for your site that should help to make it a better place for all those involved.

As I've written previously, I only entered the CSS game recently after years of web development experience. However, over the past three months I have learned much about site design and how to make things appear the way I want. It's opened up a lot of different design options for me and has helped lead to the current design of the page.

Yet, the most important thing I have learned through the process has been the lesson of validation.

Depending on your experience with site development, you may or may not be familiar with the concept of validation. Basically, it is a check to see if different aspects of your site are consistent with the web standard specifications laid forth by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This is important because most web browsers use these standards to display your pages. So, any web browser that is compliant with the standards should display your page in the same way as long as your page passes validation.

This is important in a time of emerging browsers. Where once there was only Internet Explorer and Netscape, we now have IE, FireFox, Opera, Konqueror and many others being used around the world. As webmasters, we can no longer afford to code to the standards of a single browser, because we may be alienating the users of another browser.

And the easiest part is that you only need your URL to perform validation.

So how can you validate your pages?

Well, there are three or four different aspects of your page that should be validated, depending on you you have things set up.

• HTML/XHTML - Otherwise known as markup, your web pages should be checked to ensure that they have proper syntax. Poor page syntax can lead to different display issues in different browsers. To validate your markup, you can use W3C's Markup Validation Service. If you're not familiar with XHTML markup, I strongly encourage you to check this post over at The Church Webmaster's Forum.
• CSS - Your CSS also needs to be validated to make sure that display elements will work in all browsers. Some browsers like IE have special CSS elements that they render with tools built into the operating system, but they're not accepted standards. To make sure you have a continuous look to your site, you should use W3C's CSS Validation Service.
• Links - One thing to always be wary about on your site is broken links. Even one bad link can spoil a user's experience, or make a section of your site unreachable. If you use W3C's Link Checker, you can discover and avoid these issues.
• Feeds - If you have an RSS and/or ATOM feed on your site, you should make sure that it does comply with the standards set forth for it. Sometimes you can make a change and not even realize you've broken your feed, so to be safe, you should regularly run it through W3C's Feed Validation Service.

All these validations should help to make the experience of a visitor to your site consistent regardless of what browser, computer or operating system they are using. It may not be the most glamourous thing to do, but it's an important step to take for any website.

This is the second in a series of key concepts for your site that should help to make it a better place for all those involved.

Do you remember your years in elementary and high school when you got the lecture on the virtues of doing things on your own? The lesson was that if you didn't actually do the work yourself, you may still get a passing grade but you will not have learned anything.

It's one of life's important lessons, but here's another one for you: Don't do work that someone else has already done for you!

One of my favorite things that has arisen out of the Web2.0 is the plethora of services that have become available through the use of API's (or Application Programming Interfaces). The benefit of these services are that many of them have already created a framework to implement some of the complicated things you want to do to make them easier to include in your site.

Let me give you two examples from the site I recently redesigned for my home church, South Pittsburgh Assembly of God:

• Calendar: A good calendar is a relatively difficult thing to program, and adding events to that structure can be even more difficult (especially if you have events of the "third Thursday of the month" variety). It's something that really isn't worth all the development effort for inclusion on your site. Instead, there are a number of calendar services you can use to create that calendar. In this case, I chose Kiko to manage our events, and then used an RSS feed built off that to display the Upcoming Week At SPAG section on our main page. Google Calendar is another popular option, but I found that it's ability to put recurring events into a reusable format was a bit lacking for what I needed to do.
• Map: Every church website needs a good map! How else is anyone going to find your building come Sunday morning? Sure, it's easy enough to go to MapQuest and save the image that is returned, but there are limitations to that method. Sometimes the names of roads (even major roads) are left off of them or are too small to be readable. Plus, depending on the area covered on the map, some people may not see a road they are familiar with. However, thanks to Web2.0 applications, we now have web applications like Google Maps and Yahoo Maps to build off. For our location page, I chose to use the Yahoo Maps API to create a fixed size map that was zoomable and movable. This helped to solve the road name and map scope problems I mentioned above.

In both cases, I had something I wanted to do, but I had neither the experience or resources to develop it on my own. Instead, I used publically available and free APIs to do the hard parts for me, and worked them into my design. Usually the most you have to do is apply for a free API key so that they can track who is using their service.

The only thing you will need to do is review an API before you decide to implement it. For example, the reason I chose the Yahoo Maps API over the Google Maps API was that the Google Maps API key was only valid on the domain, but I did all of my development of the site on a separate computer, and I wasn't about to deploy any code I hadn't had the chance to test first. Therefore, I settled on the Yahoo Maps API because it's key was domain independent. Sometimes it requires experimentation as well, as was the case in my calendar searches.

So, in this case, don't try to do it all by yourself. There's lots of tools out there to help you do what you need to do. You just have to find the ones that work best for you!

This is going to be the first in a series of key concepts for your site that should help to make it a better place for all those involved.

About two months ago I changed jobs, going from being a do-everything developer/database administrator/IT guy for a research study to being a database administrator for a mid-sized company. I spent most of my final two weeks at my old job gathering documentation, commenting code, and training our junior developer how to do as much as I could. Then I came to my current position, and struggled a bit with the transition for one clear reason...nothing was documented!

I know what you're thinking..."Wow, Greg...that stinks, but what does that have to do with my church's web site?"

In all honesty, it probably means a lot more than you realize.

Documentation is a key element to any kind of programming, and it applies to all web site work whether you work with ASP, ColdFusion, PSP, or basic HTML. However, many of us programmers are not always good at keeping up with our comments and documentation. Most of us are convinced we can just read the code anyway. However, I know I've gone through a few late-night coding sessions and regretted not keeping up with my documentation.

Some other good reasons to keep up with documentation:

• You're Not Going To Run Your Church's Website Forever - Probably the most important reason to document the code that you create. It gives the next person to come in or additional people coming on board an insight into what you've been trying to do. It helps them get up to speed faster. This can also be a real time-saver, as I know I've seen more than one webmaster decide to "reinvent the wheel" for their site because they couldn't decipher what the last webmaster was trying to do because nothing was commented.
• You May Not Update Pages Frequently - Chances are there are some pages in your site that don't need updated very often, but you want to make sure that you don't forget what you did on them and why. For example, you may use a content management system but make a lot of changes to customize it for your uses. If you don't document these changes, you may forget why you made them and accidentally change them and lose something. With properly documented code, it's easier to make the appropriate decision for the changes you want to make.
• Comments Make Great Notes - When you are putting together code, you may want to make a change somewhere but haven't decided the best way to do it or you just don't have the time to do all the coding right then. Instead, you can leave comments as reminders to yourself as to what you'd like to do. It's a great practice to get into, and it also keeps you from forgetting to do things that you think of while you're working on something else.

I know, I know...documentation always sounds boring and mundane. Many people even feel that it slows them down in their work, but any good programmer can probably tell you about how much time they've saved in the long run by taking the time out to complete their documentation when needed. If there were ever a lesson to take from the corporate world of software development, it's this one!