 Introduction
Because I run the web-sites for two parish churches here in England, I am
occasionally asked for advice about how to create one. I hope that you may
find these suggestions helpful.
Hosting
It is unlikely that your church will have a computer with a
permanent connection to the Internet. So you will need
"web-space" on a computer that is permanently connected.
The company you already use to connect to the Internet may well provide
free web-space (e.g. AOL, Virgin Net). This is a good way to start.
However, the free web-space may not have a "wide" connection
to the Internet, so your pages could take a long time for your visitors to
download. Also, the address of your website is likely to be long and
complicated (e.g. the address of the St. Peter's website used to be http://www.cix.co.uk/~leuty/stpeters).
And if the company which "hosts" your website ever goes bust,
then you will lose the address.
The "paying" alternative is to rent commercial web-space and
have your own "domain name". The St. Peter's site is now hosted
by Netcom which
costs us £349+VAT per annum, but includes 30Mb of web-space, a large
number of mailboxes, and our domain name. The address of the site is now
simply http://www.stpetersnottingham.org
and if Netcom should ever be unable to host our site for us we can
transfer the name to a new provider.
Content
Think about who your audience will be, and what you want to say to
them. There are three potential audiences:
- Existing (and previous) church members
- Visitors who live locally
- Visitors who live a long way away
For existing (and previous) members you may want to post details of
special services, meetings, and news items. For visitors you will want to
say something about your church and its life. You may hope to encourage
local people to worship with you, and distant visitors to visit you in
person one day. What is your style of worship? What is the history of the
building? What sort of music do you have? What is your attitude to current
controversial issues such as women priests, or remarriage of the divorced?
Would your church be a welcoming place for members from stigmatised
minority groups?
Be prudent about what you put on the Internet. Mrs Bloggs may not want
the world to know that she is recovering well after her hysterectomy. Do
not put up people's home addresses or telephone numbers. Existing church
members should already have access to this information, visitors can make
enquiries at the church office.
Design
The main principle I use is KISS (keep it simple, stupid!)
No Java, thank you
Not everyone has the latest hardware or software, so don't use fancy
effects that take an age to download, work slowly on old computers, and
won't show up on older browsers. Don't worry about "Java
applets" "Active X controls" and the like. You really don't
need them to produce interesting and good-looking web sites.
No frames either, thank you
Avoid frames - many people don't like them (including me). Frames are
often used badly on amateur sites, they make it difficult to navigate
around the site without using the mouse, and visitors cannot bookmark
interesting pages to return to later.
Tables
Tables, on the other hand, are very useful for giving structure to your
pages. Almost all browsers now in use will be able to cope with them.
Some people may only have small screens
(just 640 pixels wide) and 256 colours. WebTV is popular in America and
may become so here in the UK, and the WebTV browser is only 544 pixels
wide. I suggest that you place all your text within a table of 600 pixels
width. That way you know how the site will look, even on huge screens.
Otherwise, if someone looks at your page on a large screen (say, 1280 pixels
wide) your lines of text will be far too long to read comfortably and the
pictures will start overlapping each other.
Navigation
Think about how visitors will navigate your site. If the site is fairly
small you may just have one home page and up to a dozen other pages. Make
sure there are links to all the pages on the home page, and that every page
has a link back to the home page.
Layout
Don't create very long pages where visitors have to press the PageDown
key many times to reach the bottom. Few of them will be interested enough to
to this. Squeeze all your interesting facts into a "home page"
that can be seen with only one press of the PageDown key. It is better to
have information split over several small pages that in one long page.
Photographs take a long time to download, so keep them small and
relevant, especially on the "home" page. Few visitors will sit
still for two minutes while a huge photograph gradually appears.
Do not play music at your visitors uninvited, by specifying a
"background sound". This will take a long time to download, and
the visitor may not want to hear it.
Writing, maintaining and uploading
You will need website-writing software like FrontPage 2000 or Page Mill.
I use FrontPage but it took me a little while to get to grips with it. Page
Mill was highly recommended in a comparative review by PC Magazine and
scored highly in their "usability" tests.
HTML is not that difficult to learn. It relies on a series of
"tags" which tell the browser how to display the pages. For
example, <p> defines the start of a paragraph and </p> the end
of the paragraph. Text written between <b> and </b> will be
displayed in bold type. When you surf the Internet, look for design
features that you would like to use in your site, and then look at the
HTML code "behind" the page. (Using Internet Explorer you can do
this by choosing "Source" from the "View" menu.) But
remember that it is bad manners (or worse) to copy an entire site design
without asking permission from the author.
Further information
Have a look at http://www.anglican.org/domain/index.html
for further advice.
|