If someone does a Google search for churches in your city, how would you like to be the first result?

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.

Code is scary – wait, wait, don’t run yet!  Keeping up a website is crucial to church outreach these days.  It’s becoming the most common way visitors look for churches to visit.  There are ways to get websites without learning code – even free ways – but I have to break the bad news: they’re lousy.  Learning at least a little code is the most effective, cheapest, and I believe easiest way.

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.

Dynamic is a fancy word for something that changes.  In web design, it means a website that changes automatically (that is, without you making the changes manually).  We’re going to walk through the steps for using blog software to manage your church website’s content dynamically.

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.

Churches tend to put out a lot of printed material.  Odds are you don’t have a professional graphic designer around to handle these things.  Good typography is a great way to spruce up a design. For us novices all a big fancy word like typography means is fonts!

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!

Blogs are great platforms – especially for pastors – to create a little space for exploring and sharing ideas.  In case you weren’t sure, you’re reading a blog right now!  I can’t recommend them enough, as an opportunity to offer personal transparency into your life and thoughts, as well as a way to reach people beyond your church.

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.

Ever try to e-mail a document to find out people on the other end can’t open it?  Or maybe you want to e-mail something weird like your Excel attendance chart or something with special fonts and graphics. There’s a file format, PDF, which can display virtually anything and virtually anyone can open it.

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!

Here’s a walkthrough for creating a line graph in Excel (if you don’t have Excel there’s also Google Docs, described below) to track attendance.  It’s a little longish, but I think a lot of folks want to do something like this.  I’ll focus on Sunday worship, but you can use it for just about anything from small classes to total membership.  It’s useful for understanding the impact of decisions you make primarily, as well as uncontrollables like seasons, weather or local events.  If you track several things, you can see if big worship attendance impacts mid-week participation and vice-versa, for instance.

What You Need

First you need some data!  Odds are you’ve got at least one or two ushers.  Make a little sheet with all the categories of people you want to track.  Figure it out based on what your mission in worship is.

For our example we’ll track worship leaders and helpers (“Leaders” for here on), worshipping adults (“Adults”) and children under 16 (“Children”).  Beyond this, Leaders will be a total of the choir, minister, and other assistants (greeters, ushers, sound technician, pulpit assistant, etc.), and we’ll track men and women within Adults.

A simple half-sheet with your categories and blanks is plenty, so your ushers know what to do.  You can drop it in with the offering or have them leave it on someone’s desk.  If there’s a lot to count, you might have each usher count one section.

The Spreadsheet

Time to fire up Excel! (Skip down to Google Docs if you don’t have Excel.)  Excel is awesome for doing math and doing things in patterns, which is exactly what we’re going to do.  Note all the columns are labeled by letter, and the rows labeled by number.  Each place they cross is a “cell.”  Excel understands everything by these letter-number coordinates, so that’s how I’ll explain it.

Step 1, dates: The first thing you need is all the Sundays of the year down the A column (the far left).  In cell A1 just type “Date” and hit ENTER.  In cell A2, type the first Sunday of the year (for 2008 that’s “Jan 6″).  Excel will take a little liberty and reformat it, probably to “1/6/2008″ or something.  It can be changed, but I’ll skip that today.  Type all the first month’s Sundays and the first Sunday in the second (for 2008 that’s Jan 6, Jan 11, Jan 18, Jan 25 and Feb 3).

Now click and drag from the first Sunday to the last that you just typed (so the outline goes around all of them and nothing else).  Then click and drag the bottom right corner of your box (it should have a little square).  You’re going to drag it straight down, and Excel will fill in the rest of the Sundays automatically.  If you let go in the middle you can select the last couple months and keep going.  If you make a few extra select them and hit the DELETE key.

Step 2, categories: In B1 type “Total” for your total headcount.  Starting at C1 and going across, type each of the categories you decided to track.  Subtotals should go first.  For our example, we’ll put Leaders (C1), Adults (D1) and Children (E1) first, then Pulpit (F1; for everyone on the chancel leading worship), Choir (G1; including the director), Helpers (H1; ushers, greeters, etc.), and Men (I1) and Women (J1).  Different orders are possible, but this is easiest for what we’ll do with it later.

Step 3, Filling it in: Start by filling in your smallest counts first on row 2.  In the example, that means F1-J1.  Once you’ve got that, select the cell under one of your totals (we’ll start with Leaders) and for our example I’d type “=SUM(F1:H1)” which covers cells F1 through H1, all the subtotals under Leaders.  For Adults I’ll do the same, typing “=SUM(I1:J1).

Select all the cells you typed a function in (all your totals), then click and drag from that bottom corner all the way down your chart to the last Sunday of the year.  Now whenever you type data into a new Sunday it’ll figure your totals automatically!

Making the Chart

Excel charts have lots of options, but we’ll keep it very simple.  Select cell A1, hold CTRL+SHIFT and hit the DOWN ARROW, which should select all the dates in your chart.  Now hold SHIFT and hit the RIGHT ARROW to also select all the Totals.  What next depends on which version of Excel you’ve got.  In most versions, you should be able to right-click and select Chart Wizard, Insert Chart or something similar.  In Excel 2007 you’ve got to go to the Insert tab up top and pick the chart type.

From here Excel will walk you through the basics.  You want a line chart, with the dates across the bottom and the line showing your Total.  You should have your first chart ready!

But it Doesn’t Look Right!

There’s a lot of variables from here out as far making it look just right, and a lot depends on what you want.  I’d be glad to help you work through some of that.  Comment with your particular situation and I’ll try to help.  If it’s all too much, e-mail me (see the About page) and I can probably send you a ready-to-go Excel file.

Don’t Have Excel?

Never fear!  Google has a free application called Google Docs (www.google.com/docs).  You can make spreadsheets, including charts and graphs.  I don’t want to spend the time here detailing it out, but if you want to try it feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll help out!

This blog is for church workers (paid or unpaid) who want to catch up with technology quickly, cheaply and painlessly.  I’ll cover tips to save time, new tricks for your old website, some cheap pieces of hardware that can go a long way, and most importantly: answer your questions.  Read more on the About page

If you’re in ministry, you’re probably crunched for time.  If you like keeping up with the world, you probably waste a lot of time browsing your favorite websites for new content.  Since this is another new site I hope you’ll follow, I thought I’d start with making it easy to keep up!

RSS (really simple syndication) is something almost all websites use to broadcast their updates.  You can pick up all these “RSS feeds” in one place with an RSS feed reader.

There’s a few different readers, but I’m going to focus on two: Google Reader and Microsoft Outlook.

Google Reader

www.google.com/reader

I use Google Reader because it’s easy, free, and I don’t have to download anything.  You need a Google Account* (they won’t bother you, I promise!).  Just click the big “Create an Account” button and follow the steps.  Once you’re logged in, check out the left-hand menu.  In the green box you’ll see “Add Subscription.”  Click there and type in a website you’d like to follow.  Google will see if it has an RSS feed.  The other way is checking on the site for the little orange icon (pictured to the right).

Outlook

I use Outlook for e-mail, but I’m not a big fan of their feed reader.  However, if you use Outlook for most of your organization you might want to try it out.  On the left, below your Inbox, Outbox and all the rest is an RSS Feeds folder.  Right-click the folder and you should see an “Add a New RSS Feed…” option.  Unfortunately, you’ll have to know the exact address of the feed (which is different than the website; it ends in “.xml”).  That means finding the orange icon (pictured above), right-clicking it and copying the link (in Internet Explorer it’s “Copy Shortcut”).

Wrapping Up

RSS is the best way to keep up with lots of websites without wasting a bunch of time visiting each one.  You get all the juicy content delivered to your virtual doorstep without leaving your virtual home.

*Google makes lots of free applications like Reader, and most require a Google Account.  Their stuff is almost always top-notch, so the account is well worth it.  We’ll talk about more of their services in the future.