Thursday, September 26, 2013
Moving to a New Website? Don’t Forget to Move Your Visitors and Search Listings
When moving into a new house, one of the last things you do is fill out a forwarding address form with the post office. That way any mail sent to your old address is automatically forwarded to your new address. Have you ever considered what happens to the addresses of your old web pages when you move to a new website? Step 1: Update Your Domain Name Settings If you’re moving to a new web hosting account or a new website provider, the first thing you need to do is change the settings for your domain name (that’s your .com or .org address. The DNS (domain name server) setting has to be changed to point your domain name to your new account. (FYI, we at OurChurch.Com help new users with this. We provide domain name registration services, so we encourage our users to transfer their domain name to our registration service. We change the DNS settings for users to ensure its done properly. And as an added bonus, they then have the simplicity of both their domain and website/hosting with o
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/LVEKEXlZfx8/Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Abiding Savior Lutheran School Launches New Website!
Earlier this year, Abiding Savior Lutheran School in St. Louis, MO launched their much anticipated new custom created website. ALS School is a K-8th grade school that also offers an early childhood development program for 2 4 year olds. They have been teaching and serving their community for nearly 30 years. ASL School s mission is to Know Christ and to Make Him Known. In addition to accomplishing this through quality education, sports, and arts, they are also using their new website to Know Christ and to Make Him Known. Below are some ways that ASL School is using their website to achieve their mission: Custom Design created to keep an identity with their church. Because ASL School is a ministry of Abiding Savior Lutheran Church, they wanted a design that was beautiful, while sharing the design with the church. This gives visitors to either the school or church website the ability to see the branding and connection between the school and church. Spacious image slider. On
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/Nhwu0_qKRMo/Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Social Media: Church Announcements Members Can’t Miss
This is a guest post by Steven Smith. Have you ever heard of a phone tree? Contrary to what the name suggests it isn’t a tree that will grow an iPhone, bummer. A phone tree is an archaic network of church members used to get information out about important events. Let’s say there is a big event planned at the church tonight, but the speaker’s flight was canceled and he won’t arrive till tomorrow. How do you get word out to your members? In the past our church would use the phone tree. I had my list of ten members, who I would call and tell. They had their list of ten members who they in turn would call and tell. It’s Basically one big game of telephone, where the last people on the list could hear, “the speakers flight crashed into the church building and everything was canceled.” Important Messages and Social Media Maybe not, but the point is phone trees don t work well in our technology based world. There is a way that you can effectively communicate pertinent informat
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/GgzteMe05VQ/Friday, September 20, 2013
Funny Video: Flaws of Biblical Proportions
Are you unsure if you’re qualified to lead? Or having a difficult time finding qualified leaders in your church? This funny video reminds us that many of the greatest leaders of all time would have failed a standard interview. If you re looking for some funny, uplifting content to share on your site or social media channels, here you go. Or if you know someone who is reluctant to lead because of their past, perhaps you could encourage them with this video. Thoughts?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/LIF_JGC-AKU/Thursday, September 19, 2013
How to Shorten the Longest Part of the Website Development Process by 90%
Pop quiz: When developing a new website, what part of the process takes the longest and is responsible for most of the delays? A) Creating the design (template/theme) B) Making revisions to the design C) Installing of the content management system and its plugins Actually, it’s a trick question. The part of the website development process that takes the longest and is responsible for the most delays is… D) Content entry We can knock out the design, revisions, installation and configuration of a new custom-designed website in 6 weeks (when the client is responsive). But after those phases are complete, we often wait months for the client to create and gather all the content they want on the site. Sometimes it delays the launch of the new site by 3 months or more. Sometimes, the delays continue for so long, the organization decides it’d be better to launch the site with some of the pages blank. Two Causes of Delays There are two primary things that cause the content entry to take
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/kr7CUPbNEZU/Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
OurChurch.Com Introduces the Fastest, Easiest, Most Worry-Free Website Transfer on the Planet!
Are you dissatisfied with your current website, but the thought of the time, effort and risk of moving to a new website is making your stomach turn? Just to be clear, I’m NOT talking about the actual building of a new website. We’ve already made that dramatically simpler with our easy-to-use NE1 Web Builder and Custom Web Design Services. I’m talking about all the other things you have to do to transition from your old site to your new site. What? You thought once your new site was built, you were done? Nope. Sorry. Did you know copying web pages from even a small website to a new website could take 5 hours, 10 hours, 20 hours or more? It s not a difficult task in fact with OurChurch.Com s easy-to-use, NE1 Web Builder, it s fairly simple. But it takes time to not only copy the text, but format it, upload and insert images, transfer and embed media, and update links. You ve got more important things to do with your time, don t you? So, we developed a new Website Transfer Service
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/eRcjSEuSZrw/Monday, September 16, 2013
Yelp Warning May Cause You to Lose Visitors
Yelp (local review site) recently made a change that could impact whether customers will even give you a chance. If you are breaking their guidelines they will warn your potential visitors that they may not want to trust what they read. Bing also had several updates to their search features. I ll explain the change to the Yelp and how to protect yourself as well as tell you all about the changes Bing has made in this month s SEO update. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75R_pfOQh6M “Hi, I’m Kurt Steinbrueck with OurChurch.Com and I’m here with your monthly SEO update, so you can stay informed…” For the full transcript, click here. Video Summary: Reminder: Google changed their guidelines. You need to make sure you are not doing these link building techniques anymore. Bing updates their video search Bing updates their news search. Now listing trending stories from Facebook Yelp goes after organizations the violate their reviews guidelines Share Your Thoughts: Have you e
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/hHUSeuUKCpA/Friday, September 13, 2013
Christian video with more than 1 Million views removed by YouTube
Go big or go home! is a favorite phrase of mine, and Jon Shabaglian s new video Blow On These Embers has now done both. The video created quite a stir when it reportedly went viral and logged more than 1 million views in 4 days. Then it was removed by YouTube when those 1 million views turned out to be bogus. Dubious Marketing Tactics Jon Shabaglian s team hired hired a promotion company, SpringRank, to promote the video in social media. Apparently they used some dubious methods. The story of the rise and fall of Blow On These Embers is captured in an article and interview on ChristianMediaMagazine.com. While Jon does not go into the specifics tactics SpringRank used which resulted in the video s removal, it s likely they used some artificial means to generate bogus views and likes. Perhaps the company has bots that view and like videos. Or perhaps they purchased them from a 3rd party. A quick search of Fiverr shows a myriad of shady marketers offering 1,000 to 10,000 YouTube views fo
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/hoEjA-iQ7CY/Thursday, September 12, 2013
How the Internet Helped Me Share the Gospel Successfully
This is a guest post by Andrew Ketterly. Sharing the gospel with strangers wasn t something that came naturally to me. As a matter of fact I was a nervous wreck the first time I did it. I was part of a ministry team that trained us in sharing the gospel. Then, as a team we went to the mall once we were properly trained. I did end up sharing the gospel. But I wasn t very good at it and God didn t seem like He was present in any special way. Actually I spent the whole summer sharing the gospel with strangers and no one came to know Christ through these efforts. You might not find that to be very strange since we were, after all, sharing with strangers. But the other people on my team were leading others in a sinner s prayer and introducing people to a relationship with God and I wanted that. But what we had learned during that summer stuck with me. And instilled in me was a strong desire to share my faith with others and to see others come to know God through me. What a humbling experi
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/J_aGKmshk90/Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Video Calls Muslim Hackers To Wage Massive Sept. 11 Cyber-Attack
An English-language video posted to YouTube calls on Muslim hackers around the world to participate in a effort to bring down American and Israeli websites on September 11, the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. “We are the same people who f d you on April 7. And now we are back to punish you again,” the computer-generated voiceover declares. You can see the video for yourself here. (Warning: there is one f-bomb in the video, and of course the whole message is one of hate.) Thousands of Websites Affected? While Christians and Christian churches are not specifically named in this attack, if hackers engage in denial-of-service attacks on US servers, it could affect thousands of websites. We ll be monitoring our website, servers and Internet connections closely, and we encourage you to do the same. Protect Yourself Of course, there are always hackers out there looking to create havoc, add malicious code or insert spammy links into websites, so it s important to
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/XchowTt2xOg/Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Monday, September 9, 2013
Friday, September 6, 2013
Communications: The Ligaments of the Body of Christ
What are the most important ministries in your church? Ask this question and your likely to hear responses like preaching, music ministry, children s ministry and maybe youth ministry. These are the ministries that get most of the attention, staffing and budget. Chances are you re not going to here communications. But as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 12:12, 21-22 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. Communications Connects! A few years ago a tore the ACL in my right knee playing soccer. Yeah, ouch! I still had strong bones in my leg. My calf and quad were still in good shape. But without a healthy ACL, those bones and muscles didn t do me much good. I needed surgery and months of rehab before I could run again. The same i
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/44pWcyThp2Q/