The folks at NorthPoint Church have done a great job communicating to their community with their e-newsletter.  Here are a few things we love about it:

1. Great Content - Each newsletter includes a personal reflection from one of the church staff.  It's typically a few paragraphs long.  It's sometimes informational and other times inspirational.  
    
2. Upcoming Events - They included a simple list of upcoming events.  The list includes dates, times, locations, and links for more info.  It's just enough to inform but not overwhelm.
    
3. Options for Connection - They provide obvious links to connect on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and email.  They also have their service times and a link to a map prominantly displayed.
    
4. Clear and Beautiful Layout - They layout the newsletter to match their website's look and feel.  It's clean and simple, and it's great branding.
    
5. One Click Share Options - When viewing the newsletter in a browser, you can share it via Facebook, Twitter, or Google + wtih a simple click.

What are you doing to communicate with your people?  Are you using e-newsletter?  Has it been effective?  

Aliso Creek Presbyterian Church has put together a custom church website using the SnapShot Web tools.  One thing that you'll notice as you click through their church website is that they have some amazing and powerful photographs on every page.  These aren't your typical stock photos of generic smiling families.  Instead, they hired a local photographer to come out to their church and take some shots of people in their community.

The effect of a few good photos for your church website is priceless.  Take a look at www.acpc.net and let us know what you think.

You know your Church Website needs help if It's May and you are still promoting your Christmas Services from last year.

It's not often that you find a church website that's this outdated.  Chirstmas in May?  But it's far too common to see church websites that are several weeks behind.  

A friend emailed me today to let me know about a church wesite that he wanted me to see.  He was really impressed with design.  When I went to the site, the first thing I noticed on the home page was a big heading with the words - Latest News - We'll be meeting at __________ Park on April 3rd.  I'm assuming they are not yet announcing April 3rd, 2012.  This means that their home page is screaming in big, bold letters "I HAVEN'T BEEN UPDATED IN OVER A MONTH."

I always tell people that if they aren't able to commit to update their church website at least weekly, then don't put any dated material on it.  

Know any church websites that need help? Let us know. We'll be having our second annual "Please Help My Church Website Contest" starting next week.

You know your Church Website needs help if you don't have your contact info easily accessible from any and every page on the site.  

We recieved a voicemail today from a gentleman named Andy asking about pricing options for a redesign on his church website.  He left his first and last name, the name of his church, and his city.  He neglected to leave a phone number, an email address, or any other way to contact him.  No problem though - I figured with a little help from google, I could find his church website and grab the contact info from there.  I was wrong.

I didn't have any trouble finding the church website.  It came up right away in a google search of the church name and the city.  However, once I was on the site, I couldn't find any contact info - no phone number, no email address, no facebook or twitter info, not even a physical mailing address.  I spent about 10 minutes clicking through every page I could find... nothing.

If your church website doesn't have your contact info easily accessible from every page, you need to make a change today.

Andy - if you are out there, let us know how to get in touch with you so we can help with your site. 

Stay tuned over the next few days for more ways to tell if your Church Website needs help.  Know any church websites that need help?  Let us know.  We'll be having our second annual "Please Help My Church Website Contest" starting next week.

Do you have a blog going on your church website? I have a handful of pastor friends that have not yet jumped into the world of blogging (at least not on their church websites.)  When I ask them why not, here are some of the answers I get:

• I simply don't have the time to add something like this to my to-do list each week.  I'm busy with ministry - I want to spend my time doing things that really matter.
• I don't have enough to say to fill a blog?
• I fear that I would start strong then a few months would go by and visitors to the site would see that the latest post is from sometime last year.
• Once people start commenting on blogs, won't it get out of control really quickly? I fear that we won't be able to manage it all.

What I have told these friends (and what I will tell anyone who asks) is that none of those excuses hold much water.  In fact. there are a few great reasons you need to have a blog on your church website.  Here's the beginning of a list:

1. Foster Communication - A blog is a wonderful way to foster communication with people inside your community and beyond.
2. Subscription Options  - With the options for RSS or email subscriptions, a blog can be an great way to get information (announcements, event info, sermon teasers or reminders, etc) into the hand of the people who care.
3. Help People Find Your Church Online -  That's right, incorporating a blog on your church website is one of the best ways that you can improve your Search Engine Status or Google Ranking.  More on this in a future post...
4. Easy to Setup and Manage - With the tools that are available to you, blogging doesn't take a whole lot of time.  In fact, you can have an amazingly effective blog in just a few minutes each week.

Setup a risk-free 30-day trial and test out the blog feature yourself.  Check out this video tour of the new blog feature at SnapShot Web:

If you have a blog on your church site, we'd love to see it in action (and interact with you there.)  Post it in the comments and we'll take a look.  Have you got other reasons to add to the list?  Post them here as well.

So far in the Church Website Podcasting Series we have discussed Why You Should Podcast and the steps to Recording Sermons and Resizing Sermons for the web. Once you have sized your mp3 so that it's web-ready, you will want to upload the file to the internet. There are a handful of ways to do this but in my opinion, there is one that stand out as the best option for most church websites - that is DropBox.com.

Go to dropbox.com and set up a free account in just minutes. You'll start with 2GB of FREE Storage. By sharing your love for DropBox on Facebook and Twitter as well as inviting some friends via email, you can quickly boost your free space up over 10GB. If you have sized your sermon files well, this free space will be enough for you to host over over 1000 sermons. That's over 20 years of your preaching available on your church website for free.

Once you have signed up for DropBox, you will download a desktop app that will basically just be a folder on your hard drive. You can put the same folder on all of your computers and your mobile devices and anytime you add a file (such as a sermon mp3 file) to the DropBox folder, it will be accessible to you on any of your synched devices. You will also be provided a direct url to the file - something that looks like - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/########/SermonTitle.mp3. This direct link will be what will be used to play sermons on church websites. You will be able to embed or play this file with almost any website hosting provider. If you have a SnapShot Website, you can play the mp3 with the new Flow Podcast Feature.

More on embedding or playing the sermon on your Church Website in part 4. For now, sign up for a DropBox account and get started uploading your sermons. If you have questions about setting up or using the service, let us know. We love to help.

In the last post, I explained a few of the great benefits of setting up a podcasts for church websites. Now for the process of beginning to pull it off.

Recording Sermons - The manner of recording will have a lot to do with the sound system that you are using at your church. If there is not already a built-in recording mechanism in your sound system, you will want to connect your computer and record the sermon using software such as Audacity or Garage Band. Once you have the audio file on your computer, you will be able to burn the file to CDs. To do this you will want to use the “Export as WAV” or “Export as AIFF” command to save your recording in a sound file.

Shrinking Sermons - The WAV and AAIF files will be large files that are CD quality. Sometimes people will unknowingly add these CD quality files to their church websites. Sometimes these files can be 50MB or more for the 30-45 minute sermon. You may have experienced this in the past when you go to a church website and click to play or download a sermon… 10 minutes later, the file is ready. Most people don't want to wait that long so you will either have to convince your preacher to shorten the sermon length to about 5 minutes or simply reduce the bit rate of the audio file to make it web-ready.

If your Audio file is merely spoken word (as opposed to music) you can reduce the bit rate to 32kbps (kilobits per second) without compromising much quality. Some have even said that you can take the file down to 16kbps but in my experience, this can add a bit too much static to the sermon. If you are using Audacity or Garage Band, you will be able to reduce the bit rate right from the interface and export the file as am mp3. If you already have a large audio file and you would like to simply reduce the bit rate to make a web-ready smaller file, one easy and free way to pull this off is through iTunes.

Here are the steps to make it happen:

1. Open iTunes preferences (file or iTunes > preferences)
    
2. Choose the General Tab then click Import Settings.
    
3. Set Import Using to "mp3 Encoder"
    
4. Set Setting to "Custom"
    
5. Set Stereo Bit Rate to "32kbps" and click OK (twice)
    
6. Find the audio file in your iTunes music library.
    
7. Right click on it and choose "Create mp3 Version" - This will create a copy of your file with the smaller bit rate that you can then upload to your website.

Using this method you will be able to reduce the file size of a 30 minute sermon down to about 6MB - 8MB. Once you have done this, you are ready to upload the file to the web so that you can drop it on your church website. More on where to store this file for free in part 3.
 

When I was in college, I went to a local church with fantastic teaching. At the back of the sanctuary, there was a audio cassette rack where you could pick up a copy of a previous sermon for a one-dollar donation. I loved this cassette rack. I loved that if I had to miss a week of church I could grab the cassette from the rack and play it in my car on the way home. I loved that if there was a sermon that I thought a friend or family member would especially enjoy that I could grab a copy of it and hand it to them.

The days of the audio cassette are over (in most places, I'm assuming.) Most churches made the jump to CDs several years ago and then to the internet. With the technologies available today, sharing a sermon with those you love is easier than ever.

If your church is not already recording and sharing your sermons through your church website, here are four quick reasons that you should start right away:

1. It's a helpful way to archive sermons - I'm going to teach a 3 week series on Luke 15 this coming summer as our pastor will be on Sabbatical. I know that our church did a series on Luke several years ago and instead of simply wondering what the focus on the series was, I can simply listen to it. Brilliant.
    
2. It's an easy way to make a sermon available to a church member who had to miss the worship service for some reason - My wife and I have three kids under the age of 5.

Adding Widgets and Social Bookmarks to your Church website is a great way to increase traffic, improve your SEO, and allow people in your community to easily share your website with their friends and followers.  If you are new to all of this, here are six ways to get started:

1. Add a twitter or tweet this option
   
   You'll certainly want to make it easy for visitors to your site to tweet about your site with s simple click.  You can embed the javascript that you will find at a service like http://www.tweetmeme.com/
    
2. Add a Google Buzz button
   
   Google Buzz is a way to "share updates, photos, videos, and more."  You can generate the embed code to drop the Buzz Button on your site here http://www.buzzcounter.net/

We came across this great post on Smashing Buzz last week.  It's quite a list of free fonts for designers.  Each one has a quick sample and a link to download.  Some of them are barely intelligible but there are a few dozen in there that will be a great addition to your font book. 

Take a look here and send us a link to some ways that you've used any of these on your website.

We had heard wonderful things about Simply TXT for quite some time.  We had seen it in action on lots of our church and youth ministry websites.  We knew that it was an amazing service.  But until recently we hadn't gotten the opportunity to meet the team that makes it all happen. 

After sitting down with a few members of the Simply TXT team this month, seeing their passion for ministry, and hearing a bit about what they do and the direction they are headed, we're more convinced than ever that you have to check them out.

If you haven't already heard, Simply TXT is a group text messaging service that helps any minister get in touch with youth, parents, or congregation in general.

It's simple to use with easy to follow, cleanly designed screens.  You can get your contacts to sign up with included subscription links that you can post on your SnapShot Website, blog, or Facebook page.  Replies come back right into the Message Stream, which is an uneditable log of every outgoing or incoming message (excellent for liability protection and accountability). You can have replies forwarded to a mobile phone of your choice. And, if you're out of the office, you can send a message right from your phone with a feature called Broadcast-by-phone.

Make sure you check them out and see how they can simplify your communication with your people.  They've got a free 30 day trial with no strings attached.  Sign up here.

Follow these quick tips for using images on your church website and you'll have a site that loads quickly and looks great.  First, there are a few things you need to know.

Image Dimensions: Digital images are composed of a large number of individual dots called pixels. Every digital image can be measured in terms of pixel width and height. When you look at the information or properties of an image on your computer and you see something like this (Dimensions 3600 x 2400) you are looking at the pixel dimensions of the image. In this case, the image is 3600 pixels wide and 2400 pixels high.

Image Resolution: The resolution of an image is measured in dots per inch (dpi) for print images or pixels per inch (ppi) for images viewed on a computer screen. While not technically the same, the terms dpi and ppi are often used interchangeably. The most common resolution that you will find for images on the web will be 72ppi. This is due to the simple fact that this is the best resolution that can display on the vast majority of computer screens.

A few years ago a church could get away with having a website that was nothing more than informational – a site that merely answered basic questions about the time and location of the weekly service. A strictly informational website like this is called a “brochure website” because its content is static. It basically serves the same purpose as a tri-fold brochure that you might pick up in a hotel lobby.

The time for brochure websites has come and gone.

You already know that having a website for your ministry is important. You also know that it’s important for your website to looks great. But how do you pull this off? How do you make sure that your website has a look and feel that is easy on the eyes? How do you create site that makes people say “Wow”? And how do you avoid the common pitfalls that cause people wince when they visit your site?

We’ll mention 4 quick things that will help you create a website look that you’ll love. Some of these things may seem obvious to you, but if you were to look at as many church and ministry sites as I do every week, you would find that sometimes the obvious things aren't so obvious and are worth reviewing.

Having an online presence for your ministry is more important today than ever before. As we all know, the Internet can be an amazing way to connect with people inside your community and to reach out to people outside of your community. The possibilities for what you do online are endless - from the very simple presentation information about times, dates, and locations, to the more complex and interactive features such as social networking, discussion boards, event registration, and podcasting.

As part of our job, the SnapShot Web Team looks at hundreds of ministry websites every week. Some are fantastic, others are mediocre, and to be honest, some are so scattered and disjointed that it almost hurts to look at them - having no website at all would be a better option. The most common thing that distinguishes the good from the bad and the ugly is purpose. Let us explain…

Before creating (or re-creating) your online presence you’ll want to make sure that you ask yourself this critical question: Why?

Why are you doing what you do with your website? What should the purpose of your website be? Is it simply to convey information or do you want it to be something more? Is it to grab people’s attention? Stir people’s emotions? Get people involved? Persuade people to take action? Is it to connect with those already involved in your ministry or to reach out to those who are not yet involved?

The reality is that if you don’t have a purpose for your website, your blog, or your facebook group – if you haven’t thought about why you are doing what you do – there’s a very good chance that you’ll end up with a scattered mess that doesn’t do anything all that well.