News (selective and occasional)
comments... observations... etc.
Internet Evangelism Day website (again)
It's enouraging to see another site with the right idea... some of their material is available for other sites (like this one) to share, so I've linked in a page of website tips:- Internet Evangelism Day - Website Tips. It's another example of how websites can share material: 'central' Christian websites in the UK, e.g. denominational ones, could and should be supporting good practice and high quality in local church websites in a similar way...
18th September 2009
More good examples...
A few more sites have been added to the Good Examples section.
15th August 2009
Internet Evangelism Day - Church Website Evaluation Report
The self-assessment questionnaire at www.internetevangelismday.com/church-site-design.php gives pretty sound advice and is well worth doing if you're looking to see how to improve your website.
10th July 2009
What is a good church website?
What makes one better than another? And how do you tell? It helps if you have some objective criteria to guide your subjective opinion. I have an example here... How do you know it's good?
26th June 2009
The original Christian Web and New Media Awards...
...to give it its full title, is yet another competition with categories for church websites. There is a separate category for the best church website from a 'small' church (<100 members, which sounds a reasonable size to me, but it's good to see a distinction being made). This competition is in its third year, and is run by Premier Christian Media. Find out more at www.christianblogawards.com/categories
4th June 2009
Christian books - reviewed
TheGoodBookStall website now has over 4500 independent reviews of Christian books - a useful resource for any church website to tap into. And now you can. Thre is a feed of latest reviews, and also a simple copy and paste "put our reviews on your web pages" tool which can be configured to give you what you need.
More at www.thegoodbookstall.org.uk/include
Example on this site at Something for Nothing
RSS feeds - a much underused facility
According to The Guardian (8th April 2009 - www.guardian.co.uk (...)) a man called Adrian Short is running a campaign to persuade local councils to implement RSS feeds. I wish him every success, and hope that communictions officers in the churches are watching. With a few honourable exceptions, the church doesn't "get" RSS at all, using concepts of online information that even pre-date the Web. RSS isn't just about sophisticated users aggregating their personal newsfeeds. It's about people sharing information in the web environment. It's how central sites should be resourcing local church websites.
According to the Guardian article, only about 15% of council websites have even a single feed of their latest news. For comparison, I took a look at the Anglican diocesan sites, and found they did a bit better, with 24% having a feed for their news. But look to see who's moved beyond this first step and the list shortens to... one diocese. It's a similar situation with other national/regional sites.
ACNY
Is now the official directory of the CofE, and should therefore become comprehensive in time. It will, I expect, also start to open up its most useful features to client websites, thus coming of age.
Church website of the year 2009
Following on from a couple of recent competitions run by the Baptist Times, the Church Times and Christian Aid are running one with the title Church Website of the Year 2009. (There are other categories, as well as church sites.) This being the 21st century, judges shortlist and the winner is chosen by a popularity poll.
The good thing about competitions like this is they get people talking about church websites, critically examining their own sites, and trying to improve them.
More at... www.surefish.co.uk/web
Martin Brasier.