HTML stuff

HTML Stuff

I've had quite a few enquiries about how to start a webpage. When I first got going, in early 1996, I had quite a lot of help from my good bro Hany Bishay. My kids were part of a 2-week mission to Nicaragua that had been planned in large part using e-mail and the missionary, John Duff of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, had suggested it might be a good idea he could reach some of the parents by e-mail in case of emergency. Since I didn't have an "outside" e-mail connection at Statistics Canada at the time, I decided it was time to "get my feet wet" on this web-thing at home. I went out and got a 28.8 modem (actually ended up being a 33.6) and an internet account with infoweb.magi.com, now part of the i-Star/Psinet empire. Hany and I were standing around talking after church one Sunday and Hany said to me "we should set up a webpage for Parkwood". So began the journey. Hany worked on format and I pulled together the content. We almost started using frames right off the bat, but frames weren't common in '96, and some browsers didn't support them. Hany came over with a "shareware" HTML editor, I think it was called HTML-Easy Pro, and showed me some basics. If you want to learn HTML it's good to be curious. Take a simple page and in your browser, in the menubar at the top of the page click "View", then choose "Page Source". This allows you to look at the HTML sourcecode for the page, to see how the page has been constructed. You can also have a look at some of the documents listed below, which helped me in the early stages. After the shareware editor's time had expired, in about a month, I had learned enough to do my own coding using Notepad. You just type in the code and save it as an HTML page (whatever.htm or whatever.html). I went this route for a couple of years until I attended a lecture on HTML and the web at Stats Can. The speaker mentioned a couple of freeware HTML editors, Derekware and AOLPress. Well, "freeware" sounded good to my Presbyterian ears, so I went browsing and eventually found both. AOLPress had the annoying feature of leaving little unreadable characters that looked like little square boxes in the code. Derekware (when I found it) was a small file, simple to use, and left no annoying characters. So that's what I use to this day. The only annoying thing about Derekware is that just before I started using it, it's inventor Derek Smith was killed when his private plane went down in the Bermuda Triangle. So it is "frozen" at Version 3.0 Beta 4, last modified 6/29/96.

Well, wouldn't you know it, Derek Smith has apparently risen from the dead. Or rather, the rumours of his demise have been found to be less than accurate. See GnomeReport and keep watching www.derekware.com.

Anyway, on with some resources...

NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html

the www "official" HyperText Markup Language Home Page:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/MarkUp.html

Composing Good HTML:
http://www.ology.org/tilt/cgh/

CERN's style guide for online hypertext:
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Provider/Style/Introduction.html

A 10 minute guide to HTML:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/

Some thoughts regarding a church website

you want to give people a bit of a feel about who you are, where you came from (history), why they might want to come to your church (what are the good things that are happening?)
you need to be honest about yourselves
you need to keep your material up-to-date
a picture of the church would be nice - so you need someone who can take pictures. They don't need some fancy digital camera, since most places that develop film will put all the pictures on a CD in digital format for under $10.
it would help to have someone who has a "graphics package" on their computer and knows how to manipulate digital pictures a bit; the most handy things are being able to "crop" pictures and resize them
you need to tell them where you are and how to get there (map, maybe bus routes)
you need to lay out a list of your programs, days, times etc.
you need someone who is "in the know" to make regular updates as information becomes dated and new things happen
you need somebody who is willing to invest some time in learning basic webpage construction (probably simple HTML will suffice for a start) as well as how to get webpages and related files from someone's computer to a server somewhere else (usually done using an FTP program).
you need some space on a server; this could come from someone in your church who has an e-mail account (and probably with it some personal "webspace") or you will need to invest a bit of money annually to get your own webspace and pay for domain-name registration. This is actually pretty easy, and not terribly expensive. One hundred megabytes of webspace and domain-name registration for a year can be had for around $50 at present (Aug. 2008).
The folks looking after your site should be folks likely to be around in the medium-term at least - you don't want them coming in and creating something marvellous, then moving on six months later, leaving no-one to make updates. If you can find someone with the skills, at a minimum you should also have some "back-up" - another person who is willing to "learn the ropes".

My general feeling about church websites is, if good things are happening, why not tell others about it? And the web is probably the most cost-effective way to do that.

One of the simplest webpages I once developed for a church had five main features:

the basic info like address, minister's name, phone number, time of service, plus a few weekly activities
a list of church contacts with phone numbers and e-mail addresses if they had one
a history of the church (it was founded in 1823)
"what's new"
links (to the sites of the presbytery, synod and the national church as well as other churches in the area)

It had a nice picture of the church too, There was just one page, but it contained enough information.

One thing that is not adviseable is to put up a webpage and not update it. If someone comes to your site and sees "last updated July 2005" what does that say to them? Maybe "nothing new has happened in this place since July 2005"!

Those are some random thoughts. They should at least give you some idea of what needs to be in place, something to get you started.

If you can't find folks with the initial skills, but you would still like to have a website, you will have to "go commercial". There are many outfits, large and small, who are equipped to help, but this will cost you; it can be done for under $500 at present. One such outfit, a small company run by Christians out of New Brunswick, is ChurchWiz. Check them out!

Blessings!
Gord