In this introduction, I intend to lay out everything I learned whilst developing, publishing and marketing this site. It has turned into quite a long document and I hope it will be useful to you in the furtherance of the gospel. My approach to Internet publication and marketing may be somewhat conservative - even by Christian standards, but the Internet is a hard medium on which to decipher reliability, so care and conservatism can go a long way to encouraging readers to listen to what you have to say. Above all and everything else mentioned on this page, pray and write your site to the glory of God.
Before even beginning your site one of the most important things is to clearly define what your purpose is in creating it: Who is your target audience and what do you hope to offer them?
When I first started planning this site it was to be a gospel outreach site. Therefore my audience was to be non-Christians. Realistically, I knew that most of the non-Christians who visited would be searching for, or at least curious about, God (otherwise they would not have typed "God" into the search engine!). Knowing this I write the outreach part of the site thinking of "searchers" rather than trying also to accommodate people who just aren't interested.
In the same way, know your intended audience and write to them for them.
Either what you'll offer will be a result of your intended audience, or your intended audience will be a result of what you have to offer (I've found it to be a bit of both). But make sure you at least try to accommodate all of the needs of your audience in what you offer.
For example, you may have the desire to get the gospel message out there and so design a site with the gospel clearly and wonderfully proclaimed; but if you don't also include helpful information on becoming a Christian and staying a Christian, your audience is missing out.
It is not uncommon for aims to change. As I said above, when I first started planning this site it was to be a gospel outreach site. But I soon also wanted to offer encouragement to Christians (and so began to offer resources and studies), and now also I'm beginning to offer resources to Christian webmasters, hopefully to help build up Christ's witness on the Internet.
The important thing to remember when aims change is to clearly define them to yourself and make sure that the content you present fills those aims as best as you can, and doesn't unnecessarily stray into other areas. It is just too easy, for example, when writing an introduction to a theological topic to slip into apologetic defence of it. Remember your aim and audience in every document you write!
In the building and maintenance of your website, pray for it and commit it to God constantly. I think it is a reasonably fair assumption that the only good reason to write a Christian website is to bring glory to God in some way; let that desire never leave you as you produce your site and maintain it: to God be the glory.
In general, a few good tips that I've found to be true:
First, the golden rule: If there seems to be a majority trend in the layout of pages (for example, a link to the homepage at the top left-hand corner of each page), try to follow that. There are two good reasons for doing so:
1) If successful sites follow a certain layout, it's probably a good layout;
2) if the majority of websites follow a certain layout, your visitors will probably be accustomed to it before visiting your site meaning less chance of them being confused by your layout and ignoring your content.
If the content of your site is the text, make sure the text is also the focus of your site. It is very easy and tempting to make your pages visually stunning to the detriment of your content. Let your pages be functional and attractive before being stunning.
Plan your pages for a fast download time. Download time is a direct result of the combined size (as in "bytes"/"megabytes") of your page and every image, script, stylesheet etc that is invoked in presenting your page.
Also remember that while some visitors will be using cable Internet, others may be using something as slow as 28kps or even 14kps modems - although this is certainly rare in the wealthier countries. Try to aim for an absolute maximum download time of 12 seconds over a 56kps modem (approximately 35KB of total file size) - that should translate to only a few seconds for cable users.
HTML is in places a very ill-defined language. Add this to the fact that visitors to your site will be using different web browsers, different versions of web browsers and different operating systems, having different numbers of colours available to them and different screen resolutions, and you'll see that the potential for problems occurring in the presentation of your page is frighteningly high.
For example, years ago, after loading a new layout of this site, I checked it on my own computer (a Windows machine running Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 4.75 and Netscape 7). I also checked it on a Unix computer with both Netscape 4.7 and Internet Explorer 4, and on a Macintosh running Netscape 4.75. All were fine.
Unfortunately, it wasn't until a few days later that I realised that a Macintosh running Internet Explorer 5 couldn't understand my page and was presenting it in a totally unreadable way. The error? I used HTML to the equivalent of: "<table><tr><td><span>...</table></td></tr></span>" rather than "<table><tr><td><span>...</span></td></tr></table>". (Notice that the end-table command should have switched places with the end-span command.)
Obviously the fault was mine, but the language in this circumstance and others is so ill-defined that six out of seven browsers realised my error and corrected it in such a way that I didn't know there was an error, whereas the seventh tried correcting it by treating the "</span>" tag as an "</table>" tag, which it was obviously expecting, but resulted in the ending too early of all tables from then on.
Browsers have moved on a great deal these days, and has led to an even greater diversion of interpretation - so it is more important to be accurate, not less.
The solution to this problem comes through a three step process:
1. Plan your site around these problems. For example, to deal with the varying screen resolutions (the amount of content the visitor's screen will display) either make sure that your page expands and contracts to the varying screen sizes (640X480-1280X1024) without any problem, or force the contents of your page into a table that is uniformly narrow - it doesn't expand to fit the width of wide-screens. These days, however, screen widths are so variable that your site may end up with a lot of empty space!
2. Be aware of the various HTML and other commands that you use that may not work for everyone else. Some commands only work for Netscape browsers, others only work in Internet Explorer; some only work in certain versions of Netscape, some only in certain versions of Explorer; etc. A good guide over all of these issues is to be found at the World Wide Web Consortium, which is well worth a thoughtful skim.
3. Test with as many different systems, browsers and screen-sizes as you can. This is the only sure way to be aware of the problems you may encounter.
I include a section on advertising and donations on your site as this is an issue that I think is very important for Christian sites to deal with in a definite way.
The golden rule must be: only include (paid) advertising, or asking for donations if fund-raising is a legitimate part of the aim for your site. Otherwise, especially if the aim for your site is to spread the gospel, your message will be diluted by thoughts of ulterior motives and profiteering.
It can be very tempting to turn your hard work on your site into a fund-raising opportunity, even fund-raising for others in need; but to many, such actions seem to take the focus off the message and raise questions on why the Christian content is there. I'm sure you'd agree that the last thing wanted is for a non-Christian seeking God to think of a gospel presentation merely as a means for making money.
This is not to say that fund-raising over the Internet isn't a valid operation - it certainly can be; and there certainly can be good reasons to seek monetary support for your ministry on the web. But please be aware of the negative impact this can have on a viewer, especially when that viewer may just be looking for one good reason why they can ignore the call of God on their lives for a little longer, and therefore pass off your gospel presentation as a money-making venture not worthy of their attention.
There are a number of readily available Christian website resources out there that can add content to your site with hardly any effort on your part. I think of "Christian quotes of the day", or "Bible verses of the day" etc, where you put a bit of code into your page that gathers content from other sites on the Internet.
When using content from other sites though, I'd encourage a thorough checking of what you'll be sent, because to visitors it will seem like you're endorsing it by having it on your page. For this reason I have always been wary of devotional messages that come in this format and other similar resources, as they may have 99 good devotions and then one damaging one. You never know.
Similarly, you will find that if you use content from other sites in this way they will ask you to link back to them (which is only fair). I usually like to check where those links will go and make sure I'm happy with the destination site before I do so, simply because it is sad but there are "Christian" sites out there that aren't a good witness.
So as far as 'dynamic content' is concerned, I have always thought it safest to stick with Bible verses, as to get a damaging Bible verse you'd have to be trying to do so. In this mind I offer two resources:
As with any Internet site, it is important to keep all of your hyperlinks intact (i.e., not pointing to non-existing pages), all images where they're supposed to be and everything else as it is supposed to be. This is because the Internet is a very hard medium in which to determine quality of information, and to many, the only way to determine quality of content is to look at the quality of presentation. If it appears that the webmaster doesn't care enough to maintain their site properly, it is not unreasonable to assume also that they don't care enough also to check up on the facts they are presenting.
Scripts (and other fancy stuff) can be incredibly helpful tools if used properly, and can be a great hindrance otherwise. I am referring to the use of drop-down menus, flash presentations, forms, questionnaires, complicated images, background music etc.
If your only reason for including any of these is to 'give your site a better look', then don't use it/them. Any of these will slow down the loading of your page, many of them aren't guaranteed to work on all your visitors' computers and all of them will hinder your visitors if not used properly. On the other hand, if used properly, these can all be immensely valuable.
Images can be overused on the web, but I think are also a necessity to a certain extent. The most basic and important rule with images is to resize them so that their natural display size (the size they apear when you view them using software on your computer with zoom set to 100%) is exactly the size you want them to display on your site. If you take a photo on a modern digital camera, the photo's natual display size will be in the vicinity of 9 times the size of a whole screen, and 3.5 MB. Totally unnecessary. Use an image editing program to resize it and you will be able to shrink the filesize required by about a factor of 30 with great ease.
Do not list your email address on any page on your site, in any location. It will be found en masse and you will receive spam en masse. A trick I've found, is to create a special "contact me" page with a contact form on it. You don't need any programming experience to generate these forms as there are free services online that will do it for you (Google 'free contact form'). Then, instead of listing your email address anywhere on your site, link to your "contact me" page instead. This has the added advantage that if you ever needed to update your contact details, you don't have to trawl through your site to find every listing of your contact information; you know it is all on one page.
If this is your first web site, read on - I hope this is helpful!
Ok, you're going to be writing HTML pages, there are heaps of good tutorials on how to do this on the Net, so I'm not going to go into that. I'm assuming that you effectively have a working Internet site on your computer, but want to get it to the web.
If this is the case, you have to worry about two things: storage of your files and the address by which your site will be found.
To store your site you will be looking for an "Internet Service Provider" (ISP) or "Host" or "Server". This is basically just a really powerful computer that you will store your files on and that will allow others to view your files from. There are a number of services that store web sites for free, but come with several drawbacks, and there are any number of others who'll accept money from you in order to host your site (for more details, see "Hosting" below).
The other issue, as I said, is the 'address' by which your site will be found. This is also known as your Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or 'Domain name'. In my case, my homepage URL is "www.1way2god.net", and this page is "www.1way2god.net/wmtips.html". If you use free hosting, you will be given a URL, but it will most likely be long and 'ugly', or you could choose to buy a domain name (mine is "1way2god.net") and "point it" towards your host (as explained below).
If you choose to buy a domain name, you'll most likely have a domain name in mind already, nevertheless, it is still useful to consider the following points before buying a domain name:
There are a multitude of companies out there who offer many and varying forms of domain registration. To save on confusion, I'll recommend godaddy.com as the company I use for my domain name registrations. They're cheap, efficient and offer other goodies too. (Note: Godaddy.com may not register domains with country-specific suffixes other than the US.)
If Godaddy.com is not for you, just make sure that the company you buy from is reliable, lets you retain ownership of your domain name, and if you need it provides domain-forwarding and masking.
Here's another possibility:
There is a great deal involved in choosing a good host for your website. Essentials to check are:
There is always free hosting available. Being a Christian site though, you'll find that some out there offer better options to Christian sites and see it as a ministry to do so. Try a google search for these. I used to keep a list, but it will go out of date fast!
In the end, there are options that range from a few dollars per month, to hundreds of dollars per month. Often the more expensive option is just a repackaging of a cheaper option, and sold to people who assume that you'll get better features for more money. Have a search around, but as a benchmark, I use GoDaddy.com, and have been doing so since about 2005. They're very cheap, but offer generous packages that more than meet my needs.
Your traffic will come from a combination of search engines, other sites linking to you, traditional advertising and word of mouth.
The following points are all worth consideration:
Different search engines work in different ways. Some will rely on you to submit your page to them, others may find your site eventually and scan ("spider" or "crawl") through your site itself, others will require you to pay some sort of submission fee, others will offer good listings in return for a fee.
There are a lot of 'mass-submit' services out there, and places for you to enter the URL of your site so that they can add you to their database. When those search engines get a chance, their computer scans your page and stores the results. Then when it gets another chance, it updates its database and you're in the search results. I suggest submitting multiple pages (not just your home page), choosing pages that have the most valuable content you offer - the pages that you most want people to end up reading. These pages by nature are going to be the ones that search engines direct people to, because they have the content people are looking for (as opposed to your home page, which is usually the next page people visit after landing on your site after a web-search).
All search engines, to varying extents, will scan through your webpage and come up with a profile of your page based on the words you used, where those words are, your headings, specified keywords, sites you link to, even image names. Here are a couple of tips that are good for all search engines (these are in order from what I think to be the most important on):
Some of the bigger search engines also use a system of ranking to attempt to determine the authoritative sites. Basically, the more times a page is linked to (without obviously trying to fool the engines by over-linking), the more 'authoritative' it is judged to be. Therefore, to get a good ranking for your important pages, make sure they are linked to from every page on your site, in a prominent position if possible.
The other way to increase your 'rank' is through link-swapping, as outlined below.
Link swapping, or at least getting your website linked to by many other sites is important for two reasons. The first is outlined above, and is because it will increase your 'rank' with search engines. The second is slightly more obvious - so that people can find your site from another site with similar or complementary contents to your own.
I would suggest, that if you were to implement link-swapping, that you choose only good quality sites to link to - this will be a problem because larger sites will not link to you if you're an unknown site. So choose a new or small, yet good quality site, with content that compliments your own and trust that as their traffic grows, so will yours.
In the above, by 'good quality' I mean sites that have content on them which you would be happy to have on your site. Because if you link to an unhelpful page, the content of that site will be associated with yours and you will lose visitors. If, on the other hand, you link to a helpful site, its contents will be associated with yours and you will gain visitors.
If you choose too many other sites to link to, it will become harder for you to convince others to swap with you, so you may as well choose sites that you're happy to link to and would benefit your visitors. That said, linking to well-established sites even if they won't link swap with you can be advantageous, as a visitor will subconsciously attribute the find of a good site with the site that directed them to it.
(And I'll apologise right now and say that I must personally know the author of a site before I'll link to them, or know and trust them as a well-known, trustworthy and biblical organisation. Sorry!)
Some organisations or church-sponsored Christian sites can afford paid advertising, perhaps you can too. Paid advertisement comes in several forms: Banner ads on other websites, paid search engine submission, or professional online advertising.
While obviously a traffic boost, banner ads on other websites, unless you are link-swapping, can be expensive. To advertise on a well-visited site, on a number of pages with a prominent banner will cost hundreds of dollars for a limited time-period. I would suggest that the money is better spent as time actively searching out more search engines to submit to for free, more sites to link-swap with you, gaining a better personalised understanding of how search engines work, coming up with innovative ideas to get your site well-known, writing more content so that there's more ways for you to be found, etc. That said, it might be easier to just buy a banner ad!
If you do decide to buy a banner ad on another site, I would suggest shopping around quite carefully in order to get the best deal, always remembering that what is most important is how often the linking site is visited and how prominent your ad will be. Before you enter into any agreements, decide for yourself how much money you are willing to spend per visitor directed to your site, inform the host site of this number and attempt to get a short trial period first, in order to make sure that your ad pays off.
It is also important to choose a host site whose visitors will actually be interested in what you have to offer - so you'll most likely choose a Christian site with content complimentary to your own.
Again, I feel that money is better spent in the form of time learning and using the secrets of the web yourself. But if you must pay someone else to advertise your site for you, choose carefully and know what you're getting into. Try also to secure some form of trial period, because the money will go well into the hundreds of (US) dollars.
There are a great deal of other sources of information for building your site traffic quickly. There are especially a great deal of secular business-focussed sources that contain great information which can be turned into gospel-aiding hints and tips. Don't ever forget though, that it's God's will that must be done so prayer and a genuine dedication of your site to God is the most important thing.
The most effective way to keep the information in this page relevant and helpful, is to get user-feedback and suggestions. If you have a suggestion or comment, or if you know of any other good resources that could be included here, please let me know!