Well, it really depends on what you want to do online. Facebook can do a lot. It’s great for a simple informative page. It’s great for making personal connections with customers and the people you serve. You can even run promotions! But Facebook can’t do everything.

One of the most important and frequently updated parts of my church website is something that Facebook currently doesn’t allow for at all: sermon audio. Facebook has a place for status updates, photos, videos, events…but no place for user uploaded audio.

Facebook also doesn’t allow for taking online orders. If you’re trying to sell a product of some kind, Facebook is great for promoting the product, but worthless in actually making sales. You need some sort of online form on your website to complete the sale.

Also, even though it might seem like it sometimes, not everybody is on Facebook. If you don’t having a dedicated website, you’re invisible to a great number of people online who are searching for your church or business.

As they currently are, I’d say that having both a Facebook Page and website are still necessary. Each excels at particular things, and neither is comprehensive in doing everything that you could be doing online.

So my advice: have a website, and be on Facebook. Problem solved!

100 Most Beautiful Babies was a personal project which my wife and I started back in 2006. The goal of the site was to create one of the most beautiful pages on the internet, full of photos of babies, and where new parents could show off their adorable babies to the world by being given an announcement page of sorts. After the first 100 babies were added, and the homepage was full, we closed the site to new submissions and didn’t really think about other possibilities.

Years later, I noticed that the site still got a considerable amount of traffic. So I reopened the site to new baby submissions again, launching a new website design along with plenty of new features.

The design for the site was based on a free template called “CSS Gallery Theme,” which I used as a starting point and tweaked until I was satisfied.

But most security systems are highway robbery themselves. They cost too much, are difficult to install, or are themselves an invasion of privacy. This is where Cellular Alarms comes in.

Cellular Alarms LLC is a new company based in St. Louis, MO that sells a truly wireless alarm system that’s easy to install, easy to monitor, and has low maintenance costs.

The company approached me about designing their website, and I immediately suggested a particular theme that I found on WooThemes that would be perfect for their line of products. This would save them a ton of cash on development fees, and get them online faster. Once I received images and text for their products, they were online in days.

And since the website uses WordPress as its CMS, the client can now update the content as often as they desire without cost.

WordPress 3.1 now has its own internal linking feature. It’s really easy to use. Just highlight text, and click on the button to make a link. Then, instead of typing in the URL to the webpage you want to link to, click “Or link to existing content.” A list then appears of posts and pages that you already have published on your website. There’s even a search tool that will search inside the posts, so if you can’t remember the title of the post you want to link to, you can still find it. Just click the post, and then click “Add Link” as usual.

Unfortunately, this new functionality doesn’t yet work well with the popular plugin TinyMCE Advanced, even though the plugin states that it’s been updated for WordPress 3.1. So if you rely upon this plugin for increased functionality of your editor, you might still want to go with the method I described in my previous post.

But the process of internal linking can sometimes be a pain. WordPress doesn’t have a quick dropdown to see a list of posts while you’re editing or creating a new post. So not only do you have to scour your website for related articles, but you need to actually build the links as you would do for any external site that you link to. It’s not a monumental task for any one link, but the process becomes extremely tedious when done even three or four times per blog post.

Shouldn’t there be an easier way? After all, you’re dealing with your own website here, where everything should be integrated and play nice together. Fortunately, when you’re dealing with WordPress, there’s usually a way to do just about whatever you want to do.

The first plugin you need to install is some sort of related posts plugin. This is probably the easiest way to link to other content on your blog. I’ve been using Contextual Related Posts on a few of my blogs lately, but there are many plugins that will do the job just fine.

But you’ll also often want to link to posts within the post that you’re writing, not just provide links at the bottom of the post. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find many plugins that make this process much easier. There are several plugins that allow you to link to other posts using a system of shortcodes, but it should really be easier than that. The only plugin that really does what I want is WP Site Links. But it needs a couple tweaks to work right.

When you first install it, the plugin is actually broken (and will break your whole website!). I’ve contacted the plugin author about this, so hopefully it will be fixed in an upcoming version. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix. Edit the “index.php” file of the plugin, and find the line below (around line 64):

$js = file_get_contents( $this->PLUGIN_DIR . '/WP Site Links/js/wp-site-links.js' );

Replace it with this line:

$js = file_get_contents( $this->PLUGIN_DIR . '/wp-site-links/js/wp-site-links.js' );

Then around line 70, replace this:

echo "<link href='{$this->PLUGIN_URL}/WP Site Links/style.css' type='text/css' rel='stylesheet' />";

With this:

echo "<link href='{$this->PLUGIN_URL}/wp-site-links/style.css' type='text/css' rel='stylesheet' />";

This tweak will make the plugin work, but you’ll want to make one more tweak in the index.php file if you use custom permalinks (and you should). Change this (starting around line 100):

// Grab post links
$sql = "
SELECT
`post_title`, `guid`
FROM
`{$this->db_model->posts}`
WHERE
`post_status` = 'publish'
ORDER BY `ID` DESC";
$page_links = $this->db_model->get_results( $sql );
echo "<ul class='wp_links_ul'>";
foreach( $page_links as $link )
{
$this->truncate( $link->post_title );
echo "
<li>
<a
title='". htmlentities($link->post_title, ENT_QUOTES)."'
onmouseup='return false;'
href='javascript:;'
class='{$link->guid}'>
". $this->truncate( $link->post_title ) ."</a>
</li>";
}

To this:

// Grab post links
$sql = "
SELECT
`post_title`, `guid`, `ID`
FROM
`{$this->db_model->posts}`
WHERE
`post_status` = 'publish'
ORDER BY `ID` DESC";
$page_links = $this->db_model->get_results( $sql );
echo "<ul class='wp_links_ul'>";
foreach( $page_links as $link )
{
$this->truncate( $link->post_title );
$slug = get_permalink($link->ID);
echo "
<li>
<a
title='". htmlentities($link->post_title, ENT_QUOTES)."'
onmouseup='return false;'
href='javascript:;'
class='{$slug}'>
". $this->truncate( $link->post_title ) ."</a>
</li>";
}

This will change the standard ugly links to the pretty permalinks you’ve set up in your WordPress settings.

Plugin customization done. Activate the plugin. Now when you’re writing a post, you’ll see a new box labeled “WP Site Links.” Drag this to the right of the editor for easy access (right above the “Categories” box). Highlight a few words in your post, then click on a post in the “WP Site Links” box to create a link to it. Simple.

I studied biblical Hebrew in seminary under the teaching of Dr. Russell T. Fuller, author of Invitation to Biblical Hebrew. As anyone who has intensely studied a language knows, the foundational rules of the languages can make or break your understanding of it.

One of the foundational rules in Hebrew is that when two shewas are found at the beginning of a word (Hebrew is read right to left), the first shewa becomes a hirriq. This may not make a lot of sense to those who don’t know a shewa from a hirriq, so I made a simple animation illustrating what Dr. Fuller has famously referred to as a shewa fight.

Fortunately, there are many things you can do to make your site load more quickly, and many of these tips only take a couple minutes to implement.

1. Minify your CSS and JavaScript files. This basically means taking out all of the unnecessary space from files, making them quite a bit smaller. If you use WordPress (and you should), there’s a great plugin that will do this for you. Sometimes some JavaScript files don’t play nice with Minify, but even if you have to exclude half of them, it’s still well worth it.
2. Smush your images. Graphics are often largest files in our websites, so the least we can do is make them as small as possible. There’s a WordPress plugin for this, as well, which will smush your images when you upload them (but you’ll have to manually process all the images you’ve already uploaded).
3. Compress your text files. There are several ways to do this, but I like to do it via a .htaccess file. If your host allows you to have a custom .htaccess file, just place it in your root directory with this code in it:

   <ifmodule mod_deflate.c>AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript</ifmodule>

Website optimization is a process. There will likely always be more tasks that you can do to make your website load just a little bit faster, but if you’ve implemented the above tips, then you’re well on your way to having a faster website.

Bill Duncan had been a previous satisfied client of mine, so he contacted me about building another website for him when he had the need for a site built quickly and professionally. After discussing the details for the site, I searched for templates that would meet his requirements. I showed him a few, and he selected the one he liked the most.

After customizing and optimizing the template for the web, I set it up on a simple CMS I developed so he could continue to make updates as needed. From start to finish, the site was complete in less than 2 weeks. Not bad for a fully customized website!

There are hundreds, if not thousands of these Content Management Systems today. They range from free to thousands of dollars. They range from simple and feature-less to complex and feature-packed. Given so many to choose from, where do you start in selecting one that will work for you?

Let me make it easy for you. Use WordPress. Here’s why:

• It’s free.
• WordPress is capable of handling any website functionality you desire, whether natively or via plugins.
• It’s easy to use.
• WordPress is continually being developed to eliminate bugs and improve its performance.
• Most web designers are familiar with WordPress and like it. This means that if you ever need a custom plugin, theme, or just a bit of advice, you can find it pretty easily.

Something to note: there are actually two flavors of WordPress, the kind hosted on WordPress.com and the self-hosted variety, available from WordPress.org. The major difference is that if you go the self-hosted route, you can customize your site significantly more, but will likely need to hire a designer to help you get set up. But if a free site on WordPress.com is everything you need, so much the better!

1. The gospel. The church is more than a group of people who get together for food and fellowship. We remain in the world with a purpose: the Great Commission. It doesn’t need to be elaborate; a simple statement of faith is often sufficient.
2. Location. People will not know where to find you unless you tell them where you meet. A simple address is sufficient, but a slick Google map is a huge plus.
3. Service times. People will not know when to find you unless you tell them when you meet.
4. Contact information. Website visitors ought to be able to get in touch with you if they have a question or a need. At the bare minimum, a phone number and email address should be offered.

And that’s it. Certainly other website features would be nice to have, but these are the only truly necessary pieces of information.

Notice that these things can generally be put online once and left forever. These things rarely change, so updates are rarely needed. But if one of them were to change, be sure to update the information right away! Incorrect information online is even worse than no information online, and that’s saying a lot, because every church should have a website nowadays.