A My-Squirrel whatnow?

Most content management systems (CMS), including WordPress, want a MySQL Database. There’s files on the server that control how the site looks, but a CMS stores all the content - the text, images, etc. that you write – in a database. The short reason is it’s easier to add, edit or remove content as you go, so the site can change over time.

Anyway, I put together a short video walkthrough on how to set one up, and what information you need for WordPress. I use HostGator, but the steps are about the same whether your host is GoDaddy, 1and1 or someone else. Check it out.

Start a new Excel spreadsheet. In the top-left cell write “Items” (or whatever the items are called, such as “ministries”). Down the A column list all the items to be prioritized. Each column after can be a person or group involved. The far column will be the Total. Write each column’s name across the top row.

Fill in the numbered rank each participant gave to each item, where 1 is the highest rank. (You can do it the other way around, too, but we’ll do 1 has highest for this example.)

In the Total column, write “=AVERAGE(” (without the quotes, with the open parenthesis). Click and drag across all the numbers in the row you’re on. Then type “)” to close your parenthesis. Hit Enter.

Since these are ranked items, you may want to hide the decimal places and only show whole numbers. Right-click the cell and choose Format Cells. In the list on the left, pick Number. There should be a box labeled “Decimal places:” – change the number beside it to zero (0).

Finish filling in all the rankings you’ve collected. Then select the cell you created a total for. Click the little square in the bottom-right of the cell’s border and drag it down the entire Total column, so it covers every row you’ve put data in for. It should automatically fill the rest of your totals in.

Last, select all the cells in the Total column (except the header cell that says “Total”). Look on your toolbar up top for a “Sort & Filter” button. You want to sort from A to Z. If it asks you to expand the selection, say yes.

And that’s it! Sorting will re-order your list so the highest ranked item moves to the top. All the ranks you typed will move along with it, so everything stays together.

If you have a lot of participants, you could create a separate sheet for each group, then on your original sheet instead of ranks you’d do another average. When you get to the part where you select cells, click over to the group’s sheet and select from there. Excel can do its formulas across multiple sheets – even across multiple files!

Lots of people these days – especially the under-45 crowd – search online instead of the phone book. Google has created Google AdWords. They offer a starter edition, which will be perfect for us rookies.

How to Do It

Once you clicked the “Sign Up” button they’ll ask about which edition you want (starter), and your business’ (i.e. church’s) country and phone number. Odds are they know you already, but if they don’t you can fill in your information.

The exciting part is you get to write two lines of text up to 35 characters each – roughly a short sentence. You get to give your potential visitor a short message. It’s tough to think of. If they’re looking for a church, they need something. You want to tell your visitor what need your church can fill. You can change it later, so think seasonally. I’m writing this in November, so think Christmas. Maybe your church is family-focused (enticing parents with young children), or maybe it’s a place of healing (for depressed people, who only get worse around the holidays).

After that, you get to pick who sees your ad by selecting keywords. Google suggests a bunch based on popular searches. Go ahead and pick some, but also type in some in the box on the left. You can change it later, so don’t sweat getting it perfect the first time.

What’s it Cost?

Time for the money part! You get to tell Google how much you’re willing to spend per month. You only pay when someone clicks your ad. Once your budget has been reached your ad won’t show up until next month. It’s pretty simple, and gives you a lot of security against wasting money.

And that’s pretty much it. Once you give them your billing information they’ll start running your ad. You can update your ad whenever you want, maybe to promote a big event or season. If you get comfortable with it, you can move to the standard account (instead of the starter) and run multiple ads. It’s really flexible, and Google does everything they can to make you comfortable, especially with money.

Wrapping Up

There are people looking for churches. If you want to be found, you’ve got to make it easy on them. Since Google is the most common search tool around, it makes sense to focus on it.

Of course, you’ll want to have a great website for these visitors to go to. Next time we’ll pick up the Dynamic Church Website series by going over how to design the look and layout of a site. There’s a few basic principles to follow to make it appealing and effective.

It’s usually in the same menu as the Find function, which is CTRL+F.

If you’re totally uninitiated to acronyms like HTML or CSS, this post is for you!  If you know that stuff, feel free to skip.  If you’re still here, get ready for a bare-bones primer on web coding.  I’m assuming you use Windows, mainly because I’ve noticed Mac users are a wee more computer-savvy.  If you’re on a Mac and can’t translate what I’m saying, drop me a comment and I’ll set up a Mac-friendly primer.

Get the Right Tool

HTML and CSS are written in plain text, so Notepad will do.  However, I’m going to suggest Notepad 2 (not actually associated with Notepad).  It’s very similar, but if you’re editing code (like we are!) it hightlights the code-bits in different colors to be easier to read.  If that sounds neat, download and install it.  If not, regular Notepad will work fine.

HTML Grammar

There are two parts to know: content (which is all the stuff you want on your site) and tags (which tell browsers how to display the content).  HTML is called a language, but it’s really more like grammar, formatting your words to be read properly.  You always bookend content with an opening tag and a closing tag.

Tags

Tags are written inside carrots.  For instance, to designate something as a paragraph you start it with <p> and end it with </p> (“p” is HTML for paragraph).  All closing tags use a forward slash.  Sometimes tags will be inside other tags.  For instance, to bold a word inside a paragraph you’d start your paragraph with <p> then bracket your bold word with <b> and </b> then close your paragraph later with </p>.  That’s called nesting (like Russian nesting dolls).

Just like the dolls, it’s best to close the inner tag before closing the outer tag (so <p><b></b></p> instead of <p><b></p></b>).

Jump Right In

So open up your preferred Notepad version.  Write all this out:

<html>

<head>
<title>Test Page</title>
</head>

<body>

<h1>This is a header</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph</p>

<p>This paragraph has <b>bold text</b> in it.</p>

</body>

</html>

Save it as test.html or somesuch (just make sure it ends in “.html”), then right-click it and “Open With…” the browser of your choice (probably Internet Explorer).  Keep the Notepad version open, too.  Notice a few things here.
 

1. Your whole document is contained by the <html> tag.  This tells the browser what it’s looking at.
2. There’s a <head> section, which doesn’t show on the page.  It gives the browser some background information.  Look at the top of your browser and you should see “Test Page,” which went in the <title> tags.  That’s the kind of stuff <head> is good for.
3. Everything in the <body> tag shows up on your page.
4. The <h1> tag is a Header, while the <p> tag is a paragraph.  They have default formats that are so-so, but we’ll change those later.

 
That’s basically how HTML works.  We’ll talk fancy stuff later.  What’s important now is that you understand the principles.  The easiest way to learn new tricks and techniques is experimentation, and we’ll experiment lots in future posts.

Oh yeah, and add lots of extra line breaks between things.  And tab stuff to organize it outline-style.  The browser doesn’t care about the extra spacing, and it makes things easy for you to read.  You can even add line breaks inside tags – the browser ignores them!  Seriously, three or four line breaks between tags goes a long way.  Group similar things, spread out different things, and tab over nested things.

CSS

Now that you know HTML, we can talk how to make your content look the way you want.  CSS (cascading style sheets) is a separate file you make that dictates the styles of all your tags in HTML.  If you don’t style something it sticks with a default.  It’s a lot like HTML, so we’ll just dive in.

Open a new file with your preferred Notepad.  Type the following:

body { background-color: silver; }

h1 {
text-align: center;
font-family: Sans Serif;
color: red;
}

 Save your file as test.css and open your test.html file.  Add a new line after the </title> tag and before </head>, and add the following:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="test.css" type="text/css" />

Make sure you save both files, and leave them open for now.

Here’s a good time to mention an exception to the opening/closing tag format.  In only a handful of cases a tag is totally stand-alone, meaning it doesn’t format any content.  This is one such case – the <link> tag tells the browser to reference a second file.  In such a case, you end the tag with a space and “/>” instead of something like </link>.  Images do this, too.  It’s otherwise so rare you won’t need to worry about it – so don’t worry!

Open that test.html file in your browser again and see how your styles work.  The background should be a pale gray, and the header should be centered, red and in a different font.  Let’s break down the essentials of the CSS file:

1. You don’t need special opening tags to the whole document, like the <html> tag on your .html file.
2. Each piece of CSS is a reference to a tag in HTML.  For instance, we referenced the <body> and <h1> tags.
3. The syntax is simple: write the tag name (without carrots), a space, and use the curly brackets around all the elements you want to change (like font color or positioning).
4. For each element, you write the element name (like “background-color”), a colon, the change you want to make (like “silver”), and end each one with a semi-colon.

What I said about adding spacing applies here, too.  Puts lots of space between things so you can read it easily.

So What HTML Tags and CSS Elements Are There?

Okay, I’ll level with you – there’s a lot of them.  Yes, it’s a specific list – for the most part you can’t make your own up.  If you want a list, I recommend w3schools.com (see their HTML and CSS tutorials).  If you’re comfortable experimenting, have at it!  The files you made aren’t online anywhere, so nobody but you will see them.  For the record, I know a lot of tags and elements but I almost always have to look some up.  You’ll never learn them all, but you will remember ones you use a lot like <p> and <h1>.

What Now?

That’s it for the primer.  Next time we’re going to start putting this know-how together with WordPress and go through all the steps to make the Parkway website I mentioned before.  You need to know the principles of HTML and CSS going in, and now you do!  Hopefully it wasn’t too boring.  It gets cooler from here.

Instead of explaining, let’s use an example I put together for my home church, Parkway Presbyterian.

Dynamic elements include:

• Navigation (just under the blue header; ‘Home, About Parkway, etc.’)
• Pictures (they’re a slideshow!)
• “Upcoming Events” announcements
• Subpages (the stuff besides the homepage)

Using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)

Just like this blog, I use WordPress as the bones of the site.  You can download your own copy at www.wordpress.org.  You’ll need to already have webspace, a domain, and access to your FTP (comment or e-mail me if you have no clue what those things are).  You should have a little experience with websites and installing programs; if you don’t, try to find a helper in your congregation (or ask me!).  The WordPress site has instructions for installing.

It’s All About Themes

WordPress uses what’s called “Themes,” which dicate the look of your site.  You can also write your own or modify an existing theme – which I did for the example.  For those with some HTML know-how, you basically find the parts of the site that are dynamic (written in PHP) and do your HTML around them.

For the far less savvy, just download a Theme you like.  There are free and pay themes.  The two places I like to check are SmashingMagazine.com and ChurchTheme.com.

Later on I’ll discuss how I customized a free theme to create the Parkway site.  Your own church website will probably have some similar needs and some different.  Drop me a comment if you’ve got a specific idea you want to try and we’ll work through it here.

We Feel Fine (WFF) pulls people’s messages sent on Twitter that include the word “feel,” so you get messages with permutations of “I feel,” “we feel,” “it feels,” etc.  WFF lets you filter these messages by city, sex, age… even weather!

There’s a few ways to view it all.  Start by clicking the “Open We Feel Fine” box.  When you get in you’ll see a big cloud of dots.  Each dot is a message or “tweet.”  Click on one to read it.  On the bottom left of your screen there’s five options (the type is kinda small, sorry).  Try them out – my favorite is “Murmurs,” which shows messages decending in a continuous train.  ”Mobs” and “Metrics” are also excellent for getting a pulse on your area.

Wrapping Up

It’s hard to find useful information on your community beyond statistics.  We Feel Fine is just one web application that can give you a quick dose.  Whatever you happen to see, it’s usually a healthy reality check for what people really say and feel.

Basic Tips

• Don’t use more than three fonts.
• Use sans-serif for headers, serif for body text (serifs are the little feet on fonts like Cambria or Times New Roman, so sans-serif means without serifs on fonts like Helvetica or Arial).
• Don’t go smaller than 12pt, 11pt in an emergency.
• Leave some white space for heaven’s sake!  Space between paragraphs, wide margins… wherever you can give the eye a little breathing room.

My favorite quickie guide is Seth Godin’s Seven Tips for Amateur Type Designers.  Very short and very excellent.

Advanced Tricks, or “It Doesn’t Fit!”

There are three places where I’ve learned to adjust text to make it fit, either to squeeze in or spread out.  None of them are font size!

• Paragraph Spacing: Odds are you have a menu to change paragraph settings (in Word it’s under Format > Paragraph).  You can add spacing before and after.  Adding space before headings or after paragraphs usually looks real nice.  Work in 6pt increments and see what looks nice.
• Kerning: Kerning is an old typography term for reducing the space between letters in a word, usually by fitting them together using each letter’s natural space (like tucking an ‘r’ into the space around an ‘o’).  Kerning is usually found in the character spacing menu (in Word that’s Format > Character Spacing).  Don’t condense kerning more than 1/20th the font’s normal size (so no more than .6pt kerning for a 12pt font).
• Line Spacing: In that paragraph menu from before you’ll probably see line spacing near paragraph spacing.  It’s usually either set in terms of ‘sp’ or just says ‘Single.’  You can reduce line spacing by as much as 10% for squeezing.  Expanding to 1.15sp looks fantastic when you’re not crunched.

Finding New Fonts

Your one-stop-shop should be dafont.com – it’s free, it’s got lots of useful categories, and you can type in the word(s) for a preview of them in each font.  Don’t use more than one crazy font in a project, and only use it for big title words.  Your main text should always be a familiar, simple font like Cambria or Helvetica.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for now.  You should have a lot of helpful tips and tools for your creative ideas.  Look around and see what other people are doing, too.  You can take lots of inspiration from other churches or websites like Church Marketing Sucks or Church Relevance.  Good luck, and let me know how your designs go!

Start Simple

If you’re new to blogging, the best way to start is simply getting your feet wet.  Head to Blogger.com and sign up for a free blog.  Blogger is the simplest free blog platform, which makes it ideal for beginners.  I recommend phrases for blog names, since all the short names are taken.  You don’t have to share your blog yet, just get used to writing in a public space.

Writing Tips

• The Reverse-Pyramid: Make your point first, then explain.  Your writing teachers may have taught you to introduce your ideas, build up the background, and conclude with that magic bullet sentence that ties it all together.  That sentence needs to be your first.  Readers online scan text to see if it’s worth reading in detail, so make it easy on them.
• Write Often: Many Christians describe blogging as a spiritual discipline.  There’s no rule about when to blog, but see if you can post something at least once a day, even if it’s only a couple sentences.
• Use links! The internet is taking over because it gives users control with hyperlinks.  Whenever you mention a book, another website, a bible verse, or anything with more depth, make that text a link (you don’t need to write ‘click here’ or anything).
• Lists, Bullet Points and Sub-Headers: Like I said, readers online scan text first.  If you write more than a couple paragraphs, break it up with headers and bullet-pointed lists (like I did with this post!).

Wrapping Up

Blogging is part of the postmodern language.  You don’t have to have something profound to say.  Part of the Christian mission is sharing ourselves as the living gospel.  Blogging is an opportunity to share yourself.

There’s a lot we could talk about with blogs and blogging.  This is just a primer.  Soon we’ll talk about websites, and eventually how you can put a blog on your church’s website.

PS: I’m trying a new polling feature here!  At the end of each post I’ll put a little poll so you can let me know how helpful it was.

There’s a few programs you can use, but I like PDF995 (download it here) because it doesn’t have any bells or whistles, it just makes PDFs.  On the download page you’ll need the Printer Driver and Free Converter.

Once they’re downloaded and installed, open up a document you’d like to PDF-ify (try your newsletter).  Go to File > Print.  At the top of the Print dialog box (the new menu that pops up) you should see your printer in a dropdown box.  Click the name to see your other options.  PDF995 should be there.  Click on it, then click Print.  After a second it’ll ask you where you want to save your new file; pick a spot and hit OK.  You’ll get a progress bar, then a pop-up advertisement (the cost of free software), which you can close.  Your new PDF should open for you to inspect.  E-mail it to all your friends!  (Or don’t.)

Questions?  Leave a comment!