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How to Write for Web Pages - Part 3 - Preparing To Write a Story

From: 8/1/2014

In the second installment of this series, we discussed making an overall editorial approach for your website plus collecting stories idea into an editorial calendar that is the master list of all potential upcoming stories that may appear in the website.

The next logical step in producing content is assigning the story ideas from the editorial calendar to writers for developing and writing a story.

In many churches, the pool of available writers who will work on the church website is relatively small. Webmasters quickly get to know the capabilities and skills of each member of their teams. Webmasters will make subjective executive decisions about which writers get certain assignments. These judgments are typically based not only on the skill of the writer but also on the past work of the writers on certain types of stories.

A wise webmaster will always endeavor to increase the size of the writer pool available to the website as well as the skill levels and experience of each member of the talent pool. This process will require the webmaster to do recruiting and management as well as training.

Also, experience itself is a great teacher. New members of the web team might get some initial training (like reading this tutorial series) and then assigned smaller stories in order to gain experience without becoming overwhelmed by the scope of the writing larger feature stories. With some experience gained from working on smaller stories, the rookie writer will typically be given more challenging assignments progressively.

One of the important processes that a rookie writer should learn first is how to prepare to write. If a writer prepares properly and in depth, seasoned writers will often say, “The story wrote itself!” Translated from writers’ jargon, this means that the facts discovered in research and the information and quotes uncovered in field reporting meant that the story was clear and obvious before the writer wrote the first word of the story.

If well prepared, writing the actual words of the story can become very easy.

This installment of the series will discuss how a writer prepares to write a story.

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How to Write for Web Pages - Part 2 - Macro View of an Editorial Approach

From: 7/31/2014

In the first installment of this series, the concept was put forth that websites are indeed publications of churches (albeit online publications) and should operate as journalistic enterprises. Such websites should be operated very similarly to the ways newspapers, and magazines operate.

Publication-type operation is a proven approach for church and ministry websites, and I strongly recommended that webmasters operate their websites like a journalistic endeavor.

If so, the development of content for journalistic-style websites should be directed by over-arching editorial strategies and tactics that mirror similar policies used by newspapers and magazines. In all journalistic endeavors, content isn’t developed randomly; it is developed intentionally along the lines of pre-defined strategies and tactics.

In the second installment of this series, we will discuss various strategies and tactics you can include in an editorial approach for your website.

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How to Write for Web Pages - Part 1 - Introduction

From: 7/29/2014

Significant components of the leadership that should be provided by all church webmasters are the recruiting and training of volunteers to work on the online assets of churches. Nowhere is this more important than finding and preparing people to write for websites.

This blog series will introduce the techniques for writing text for use on a web page. It is intended for training people who are new to writing for publication on the web.

This series will start with the assumption that you wish to produce the best possible web pages for your site and to improve the effectiveness of your writing as a communication tool. The overall goal is to improve your communication within your church and importantly, also with people outside of your congregation who visit your website.

This series will discuss the techniques and best practices of a journalistic style of writing for conveying information to the people who visit your website.  This paper will provide a step-by-step process for preparing for writing a story along with guidance and tips for the actual writing of each of the major components of your story.

This series is not intended to be a creative writing course but instead, it will talk about the practical nuts and bolts of communicating with your audience through a basic journalistic approach that anyone, even those new to writing for publication, can easily learn.

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Think About Your E-Mail Service

From: 6/29/2014

Since I work in a professional field in a sizable organization, I have always had a highly-capable and highly-reliable e-mail service. Rather than a simple POP3 mail service, my system is actually an advanced groupware service that is more inclusive of other serves than just e-mail.

I have always been partial to the Microsoft Exchange Server product. It has lots of features specifically designed for facilitating a far-flung group of colleagues who need to collaborate and share information in a secure online environment. Exchange Server is e-mail on steroids! It allows sharing mailboxes, calendars, contacts, to-do lists, etc. in a secure environment. It even ties into our conferencing service, telephones and other services requiring scheduling and coordination.

I’m writing this blog posting because I just helped a friend migrate his e-mail service to a new hosted service. I was surprised by how these services have evolved in the recent years.

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The Heartbleed Vulnerability: Did You Get Whacked; If Not By the Bug, the Hype?

From: 4/9/2014

This week, the press has been widely discussing the Heartbleed vulnerability (more formally known as CVE-2014-0160) that exists in certain versions of the OpenSSL package used by some online services and hosting providers for their SSL and TLS services.

You may be susceptible to Heartbleed at other sites and other devices you use, so we recommend you take the vulnerability seriously. Not only might you be vulnerable through websites you visit, but the websites you manage might also be vulnerable to CVE-2014-0160.

Heartbleed has been described as "one of the most serious security problems to ever affect the modern web" and "on a scale of 1 to 10 in importance, it's an 11!" Yes, some of the reporting has been over the top but this is still an important bug.

There has been a lot of reporting on Heartbleed and, unfortunately, some of it has been bad reporting. I thought this was a good opportunity to set the record straight.

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Evangelism by Search Engine – Part 8 – An Ecology of Content

From: 5/30/2013

In this series “Evangelism by Search Engine,” I hope you have seen that websites are not monoliths or hierarchies. Information on the pages in your website does not exist in isolation. There is an “ecology of content” where visitors interact with web pages within the environment of your website. Everything is interlinked; each page is an individual unit but is also interdependent with other pages and creates synergy among the whole! The resulting ecosystem of content is a gestalt of wholeness in form, but one that is made up of freestanding piece parts of hypermedia. Visitors, as they flow from page to page, aggregate the values of individual behaviors and interactions.

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Evangelism by Search Engine - Part 7 - PPC Ads

From: 5/27/2013

In today’s blog posting, I am going to write about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. With PPC advertising, you don’t have to wait to earn your search engine results page (SEPR) positions; you buy them! Because you purchase your position, you have a high degree of control over when and where your content appears in the SERPs. Also, your results can be immediate instead of having to wait for you organic page rankings to climb; you get immediate gratification for the money you invest in PPC advertising. PPC ads provide opportunities for churches to extend their evangelism-by-search-engine strategies very quickly beyond what they can reach by organic tactics alone.

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Evangelism by Search Engine – Part 6 - Local Search and Hyperlocal Sites

From: 5/24/2013

Today, I will be picking up this series where I left off ten days ago writing about Evangelism by Search Engine. I want to write about an often overlooked aspect of the use of search engines by churches and ministries: “local search” and "hyperlocal sites." If you are a local church, serving the people in your parish well is one of the most important things your website can do. Therefore, making your site easy to find by these, the most important of your visitors, is a very important task for any webmaster.

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Evangelism by Search Engine – Part 5 - Applying Best Practices

From: 5/10/2013

In the previous blog postings in this series, I have written about the concept of doing evangelism by search engine, search engine optimization, its theory of operations and recommended best practices. In today’s posting, I am going to write about how to apply all of these practices in a simple, practical, real-world scenario in order to provide a working example that you can follow if you are new to SEO.

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Evangelism by Search Engine – Part 4 - Off-Page SEO Factors

From: 5/8/2013

In Part 3 of this series, I wrote about the two different methods that most modern search engines use to rank search results: (1) on-page factors; and (2) off-page factors. In Part 3, I also covered details about how the on-page factors work. In today’s blog posting, I am going to write about off-page factors used in ranking pages shown in search results and how they can be used to improve greatly search results for end users as well as the websites that do basic SEO processes.

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