I thought pretty hard about the top level structure of the site’s navigation. There were two principles for me:
1. I wanted to keep it lean. Previous attempts at making church websites have tended to spiral out of control and become bloated with content and this was reflected in an expanding navigation. Besides, the books say 5-7 links in your main nav is the ideal.

2. More Importantly: I want it to be a no brainer for users to work out where they need to click to have the question which drove them to the site answered.

So I decided on this:

• HOME
• NEW HERE?
• SUNDAYS
• WHATS ON
• RESOURCES
• CONTACT US

I’m sure you’re thinking that there’s nothing remarkable about that list, and there’s not. But there were a few I culled. Many sites have an ‘ABOUT US’ or ‘INFORMATION’ section, with content like staff profiles, the history of the church, or the church’s mission statement. I figured that kind of content is mainly relevant for new comers – seasoned attenders know what the senior minister looks like, so I put (some of) that stuff in the ‘NEW HERE?’ section.

I’ve also seen a lot of ‘MINISTRIES’ pages on church websites. This is where all the groups and activities which meet during the week get a plug. I just felt that the term ‘MINISTRIES’ could be pretty opaque to a visitor. I toyed with GROUPS, or ACTIVITIES, but in the end I decided to rename my CALENDAR Page ‘WHATS ON’ and lump all that in together.

This is also why I didn’t call the SUNDAYS page ‘SERVICES’. While we do run church services on Sundays, I think in interweb land Services are things that a company like NRMA offers their customers.

Now, when I think back to my three users and imagine their questions, I think it’s pretty clear what to click on.

The local not-yet-member
What time is church on Sunday? (SUNDAYS)
What’s this church going to be like? (NEW HERE?)
What’s the phone number of the church office? (CONTACT US)
Where is the church? (The map is on the ‘CONTACT US’ page and I think this might be a problem with my set up)

The Church member
What time does that men’s event start again? (WHATS ON)
I missed church last week and want to catch up on the sermon. (RESOURCES)

The Christian From Another Place
I’ve heard that Alan Lukabyo is a gun preacher, where can I listen to his gear? (RESOURCES)

The interweb has been around for a while now. Surely, there need not be such a thing as ‘out of print’. Can’t publishers just put all their old works on print-on-demand libraries like lulu.com.

And why can’t I have the option of buying a PDF and downloading it immediately? Save some money, time, paper and diesel.

Rant Over.

I’ve been getting 25 min sermons down to about 6MB, and still very clear and easy to listen to. That’s pretty good I reckon, that’ll upload and download nice and fast.

Here’s my export settings in QuickTime Player:

First up, I had in mind three separate groups of users who I wanted to cater to in the following order of priority:
1. The local person who is not yet a member of our church. My great hope with this site is that Christian and non-Christian people in the Dundas area who are thinking about coming to church or are invited to come to church by a neighbour will be helped to actually come by the website.

2. The church member. My second hope is that our church community will find the site genuinely useful. I want the site to serve communication among our members. I want them to know about and like the site so they will email the link to everyone they know.

3. The Christian from another place. I have benefited greatly from churches who put quality sermons and resources online and I’d love for our church to be able to make our little contribution to the growing library of evangelical resources that are on the internet.

So my first step in thinking about this site was to identify these three groups of people who I want to target. Have I missed anyone?

There are two factors that made this option compelling for me.
1. Gmail is a great mail service… its fast, reliable, free. It has a generous amount of space (7GB per account), has a good web interface as well as POP/IMAP and all the rest. It’s a snap to create new email addresses and manage all the accounts.

2. Once you have Google Mail on your domain, you can tap into Google’s other collaborative web apps really easily. The church staff will already have accounts and the sharing settings are automatically set up. So everyone can share calendars (at cal.dundasanglican.com.au), documents and spreadsheets (at docs.dundasanglican.com.au). Looking forward to seeing what we can do with it.

All I could find was was a Good News New Testament with background music here.

And if you want to make your own – licensing is problem…

but I just found this from our friends at the NET (New English Translation)

from http://bible.org/copyright
“(NEW) There has been a lot of interest in producing audio recordings of the NET Bible for local ministry user. Therefore a local ministry eg. Church is granted unlimited non-commercial rights to use the NET Bible text to make audio recordings. You can produce audio recordings of partial or complete books of the Bible (WORK) for free distribution on email and/or CD within the congregation, and as free MP3 downloads made available on the church website and the personal blogs of members of the church to be of benefit to the church at large. This permission is contingent upon an appropriate copyright acknowledgment, on the distribution copy (website or CD) and you need to include an audio insert at the end of each recording in addition we require that you grant us permission to use your WORK and any promotional material that you use for the WORK.Sign and send us the NET Bible Contributor License Agreement form.”

Thanks NET for translating God’s word for us and for your generous, open licensing.

I’ve got a microphone – anyone got a good news-reader voice?

I reckon part of the problem is an over ambitious ideas about the kinds of content that will be available.

You build your site thinking ‘wouldn’t it be great to have a photo gallery’. It would, but if no one is taking a steady stream of good photos, then the gallery’s most recent pics will be the ones you uploaded when you launched the site from the church camp back in 2006.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice for each staff member to have their own blog on our site’ – certainly – but if they’re not blogging now, why will suddenly start if you make a website with blogs?

I have definitely made these mistakes before.

Generating content is the big killer for church websites that are anything more than a few static pages (a very good and respectable option in many cases.)

I reckon the trick is to start by thinking “what content does our church naturally generate?”

I am in the process of building a new site for my church and I boiled it down to these three things: Sermons, a Calendar and a weekly blog (currently appearing on the front of our hand out).

That is more than enough to work with and keep a site looking fresh and up-to-date, but limiting myself to these three streams of content, already in production week in and week out, greatly increases the chances that the site will keep fresh.

Thats the theory anyway – we’ll see how it goes.

Anyone game enough to use it in a sermon?

(Via TechCrunch)

What do you think? Did they nail it?

It was also the first essay I’ve completed more than a day in advance. Due Wednesday, finished last Friday.

But more interestingly, it is the first one I’ve submitted online. The Moore College ‘Learning Support System’ is getting beefed up more and more each year, and this is a great development. No more printing, no more cover sheets, no more racing to the office to beat the 5pm lockout (now we race for the midnight deadline). No more special trips into college (for those who don’t live on campus). Everyone’s a winner.

Some church go-ers are excellent at writing these dates in their diary and then showing up dutifully when they are rostered on. If they can’t make it, they arrange a swap with someone else well in advance and then let the right person know.

The problem is, not everyone is like this.

For some people, rosters never make it home- they leave them on their seat at church, or under the seat of their car. Some people don’t have diaries. Some people don’t look at their diaries. This means many ministers or service leaders spend a chunk of time every Friday doing the ring around making sure everybody has remembered.

There must be a better way.

I have long dreamed of creating a web based thingo that would store the rosters so that they could be looked up anytime. Perhaps supply a unique calendar feed for each person so that their week automatically pops up in their iPhone. And crucially, each person would get an automatic email or SMS reminder on Friday arvo telling them to be there or be square.

But there are lots of challenges to designing a system like this so that it would work well and be used. For example:

Entering all that data through a web form would be painful – probably too painful for anyone to be bothered, especially someone who is used to knocking these things up in Excel. But the alternatives might be a bit too high tech.

Secondly, the thing would need a whole lot of data that a simple spreadsheet-in-the-hand doesn’t, like it would need to know everyone’s name, email’s and mobile numbers. It wouldn’t be enough just to say Bob is on guitar or Jan is on flowers. This is a whole lot of extra tedious data entry for some one to remember to keep up to date, and find the time to do.

Thirdly, The Excel file is a handy thing, for the people who need the big picture, and to stick on the notice board etc etc…

So, has anyone found a solution to this problem? Does anyone have a system in place that puts rosters on the web with notifications – that is a good servant and not a master? Once I’ve heard your ideas, I’ll give you my latest one and we can keep the dream alive.

Look at the spreadsheet here:

Watch the first episode here:

SX:digital – March 09 from Sydneyanglicans.net on Vimeo.

With Microsoft’s IE8 almost upon us, along with Google’s Chrome and the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, it’s great to see us moving beyond the browser dark ages and competition heating up again.

With Safari 4 Apple is continuing to push browser technology ahead and is showing itself as a real contender at having the best browser available.

So here are my impressions:

1. The Good

• Speed – it’s really fast. Especially Javascript
• Better search features – built in google suggest, the location field searches your history, and search boxes placed prominently in the bookmarks section make it easier to find stuff you’ve seen before.
• Excellent developer tools – With an inspector, debugger and a profiler, Safari 4 is approaching Firefox’s usefulness as a web development tool.
• Top Sites – I actually created a homepage that looks a lot like this. Having it built in is real handy. No more editing HTML and taking screen shots.

2. The not-so-sure

• The tabs – these sit right at the top of the window. It’s been a little hard to get used to and isn’t what I’m used to. I think the metaphor is better, but I’m not finding it as simple to use as before.

3. The Ugly

• The progress indicator – it’s gone! The location bar used to show how much was left to download, now I’ve got no idea. This is really frustrating. I hope it’s a bug.

I hope they deal with some of the usability problems by the time it makes it to a full release. But overall I think the Safari 4 Beta is an excellent, competitive browser and offers a very good alternative to IE and Firefox.