Public Sample of the
Online Ministries Community Blog
This is a public sample of a regular blog published for church webmasters and all those involved in building and operating effective online ministries.
The blog discusses current issues for building better, more effective Internet presences that can rise to the level of being true ministries.
Below are public samples of the blog. The full blog and other tutorials and forums are in the password-protected Online Ministries Special-Interest Community. To comment and participate in all of the content within the community, register for this FREE community.
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Recent Blog Postings
Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts - Part 2
From: 4/15/2013
In the first part of this series, I wrote about an all-too-common situation; one that I see so often, I have given it the name, “Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts.” I described a situation where someone with a great deal of technical prowess, a geek, produced an initial tactical success of producing a nice website but ended up with a strategic failure by having a site that couldn’t be updated with fresh content often enough, or sometimes at all. The battle was won but the war was lost.In the second part of this series, I am going to discuss why things went wrong; the root of why things turned out as they did.
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Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts - Part 1
From: 4/12/2013
I just have to share this story. For the last couple of days I have been in a running dialog with the pastor of moderate-sized 500-member church in an affluent suburb of large urban city in the southwest who is a long-time acquaintance. He has a mess on his hands. It is a story that I have heard often but his is an extreme case, one that provides a teachable moment.
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Minimal Editorial Skills Needed For A Church Webmaster To Thrive
From: 4/11/2013
In yesterday’s blog posting, I discussed organizing an online ministry team around a traditional publication model. Today, I’m going to drill down into the functions of the editorial department and the department's leader: the webmaster. Please note that a webmaster might perform additional functions in other department too, like production and circulation. However, today, I’m only going to discuss editorial functions. Also, in this posting, I will only discuss entry-level skills for a webmaster or the minimum skills need to do well in the position.
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Organizing the Management of Online Ministries
From: 4/10/2013
All of the components of a church’s Internet presence can be managed just like any newspaper or periodical; like any traditional paper-based publication. In all actuality, church websites and social media presences are electronic publications where web servers merely replace the traditional printing press. The organization of traditional publications provides an organizational model that is an excellent analog for managing any church’s Internet presence.
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What Can Be Destination Content?
From: 4/9/2013
Destination content can be any content that causes a significant number of potential visitors to actually visit your website and return later for more. Put simply, destination content is worthy; worthy of visitors’ time in their initial visits and worthy of their return visits tomorrow, next week or next month. Good destination content is the “procuring cause” for visits.
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Destination Content
From: 4/8/2013
In online ministries, more is good! More unique visitors to a website, more pages viewed, more friends on Facebook, more followers on Twitter. The more the merrier. It is one of the basic roles of anybody who manages the Internet presence of a church or ministry is to get more visitors, views, friends and followers. These are the important results of the entire online enterprise and an important reason for the endeavor. Simple enough of an observation but “Okay, how?” is a much more interesting question.
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Grrr … Browsers!
From: 4/5/2013
Differences in browsers are the bane of any webmaster’s existence. The impact of frequent updates to browsers make things even more interesting. It is just part of the realities of our technical life. About the only thing one can do is occasional mutter through clinched teeth, “Grrr … browsers!” In case you are wondering, it is a pejorative phrase.
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Using Content to Drive Online Dialogs
From: 4/4/2013
You can put web pages or social media postings out there but your visitors will have to respond and you will need to entice them to do so. Causing a visitor to speak up does require some work on your part. You have to create content that entices a visitor to speak; to say something to you.
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All Content Should Be Social
From: 4/3/2013
Why do some people think that powerful social interaction is the sole province of Facebook? It is very limited thinking to believe that social content can only appear on the large consumer social media sites. A large percentage of your church's entire website should be social in nature by providing the mechanisms for generating, collecting and displaying what your visitors are willing to share. All online content should be social! Church websites should be social.
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Do You Know Where You Stand?
From: 4/2/2013
A homily says, "You can't manage what you can't measure." If you don’t know a great deal about how how many people are visiting your website, who they are and how people are using your Internet assets, you will never know how effective your online ministry is doing. You will not know how to make changes to become more effective. Worse, you could make uninformed changes that could easily do more harm than good!
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