The eMinistry Letter :: November 2007
While many 40+ year olds have not yet come to fully understand the wired world we live in, today’s younger generations cannot imagine the world before it was wired. This is literally not their fathers’ world.
My children go to the internet for almost everything! Movie schedules, a favorite restaurant’s menu, missed T.V. programs... help with their homework; things that I went to the yellow pages or library for, or simply lived without.
Our world has quite literally changed before our eyes in the past twenty years. The youth of today think differently about information and research than I did thirty years ago. And, perhaps more importantly, they think very differently about socialization and community. And you can thank the internet for that.
Designing and writing a ministry website with care, prayer, and planning is crucial to the overall success of any eMinistry. Equally important is planning and implementing your strategy for driving visitors or targeted traffic to your website.
This is true when you’re building a web ministry for a global audience and it is true for a church website whose audience is confined to a single geographical region.
The best designed, best written website is pointless if the people who would benefit from your site aren’t seeing it when they’re surfing the web. As a website owner or manager, one of your primary goals should be to obtain website traffic.
When I first began creating websites in the mid-nineties, I knew of only one way to do it. I learned HTML and, by trial and error, I learned website design. Later I learned how to work with Javascript. By the end of the decade I had taught myself how to work with Active Server Pages (ASP) and learned VBScript by reading programmers’ books and through persistent hands-on trial and error.
Through the years I had to learn other scripting languages as well, as well as Macromedia Flash and graphics and photo editing software. It seemed that as soon as I felt comfortable with one language or software program, I had to learn another just to keep up with current technology and website practice. In the year 2007, it is still like that.
Some time about 1 a.d., a baby boy is born in the Cilician city of Tarsus. Jesus is a young boy, not much older than a toddler, in Nazareth. The boy’s parents are Hebrew, proud Jewish people of the tribe of Benjamin, but living far from Jerusalem, in the city of Tarsus in the region of Cilicia.
Tarsus is a university city, an important and prosperous city of Cilicia between the Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. It is a major center of Hellenistic culture with a mixed population...
Virginia Web Works is a small family business. I do the majority of the programming and SEO work as well as maintain the books. My wife and a family friend proofread and test usability of websites. They also help clients with website design and maintenance in our website builders. My oldest son does ongoing website maintenance for a number of our clients and sends out invitations to build our eMinistry Letter subscribership.
While we are a business formed as an LLC, we consider what we do to be ministry. In fact, I am an ordained minister and my wife is a singer-songwriter-musician who has been involved in leading worship at churches for most of her life, and she is the music director at the church we currently attend.
Unsolicited junk mail is a huge problem that I deal with every day. If you use email much, you’ve probably grown to hate spam too. Most email apps come with spam filters to keep spam out of our mailboxes, but unfortunately these filters are far from perfect and legitimate email is also frequently caught in them. Because my business runs on email, this is problematic and makes it necessary for me to scan through all the spam to find email I do need to see.
Recently, I received an email from a person that I’m going to call Randall that accused me of allowing one of my mail servers to relay spam. I knew that my mail servers were closely monitored and did not believe that they could be used to relay spam, so I asked Randall to send me one of these spam emails so I could examine the header.
A thorough examination of the header made it clear exactly what was going on and I was able to stop the flow of spam.
What do you pay each year for the domain name you own for your website? More than $6.95? That is the price Virginia Web Works sells .com domains for every day. I invite you to check out our sales site at domains.vawebworks.com for domain names, discount website hosting, website builders, traffic stats, email newsletter tools, traffic builders, SSL certificates, and more.
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