Recent Articles

Over the last two years we have become increasingly involved in Internet Marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as part of our follow-up service to web design clients. Often building a website isn't enough - once up and running, the site needs to be found by customers in order to perform correctly.

We have recently launched this service under its own banner, calling it 'Webmojo'. If you'd like your website to perform better for your business or if you'd like to know more about SEO and Internet Marketing, Webmojo is a great place to start.

There's three main ways a website can be found by potential customers:

1. Through a search engine like Google.

The vast majority of us use a search engine like Google to help us find what we are looking for on the internet. By making sure that your website appears high in the results for relevant searches you can ensure that people will visit your site.

This is the role of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - to adjust your site so that it has the best chance possible of being found in major search engines.

2. Through advertising or links on other websites

Whether it's paid advertising or free endorsements, having links on sites that your potential customers are already viewing means that some of them will click through to visit your website. Options for advertising range from inexpensive text ads like Google Adwords through to large animated banner ads on popular websites.

See the Online Advertising page on Webmojo for more information.

Ebay has dropped its proposal to move to a PayPal only system in this country, causing a collective sigh of relief amongst concerned Australians.

The backflip follows a conference help last week by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on the company's plans to only accept PayPal on the site.

Ebay had argued that its Paypal system of online payments is more secure than other methods, and would reduce fraud.

Personally, while it seems most of the arguments at the ACCC conference were concerned with the extra fees that Paypal incurs, I think their basic premise is also unreasonable.

I don't know anyone who's ever managed to get a refund from Paypal, yet my list of friends who have had grievances with them is as long as my arm. While none of us have experienced any security breaches like hacking or theft, a total of eight inluding myself have experienced fraud and none of us have been covered by Paypal.

The reason many of us chose to pay using Paypal at all is because of the claims on the Ebay website that you are 'covered' if your product doesn't arrive. Despite these guarantees, in the last eighteen months none of us were able to get a refund from Paypal when products did not arrive from a clearly dodgy seller. This sours not just our experience of Paypal but the whole of Ebay.

So when Paypal doesn't deliver on the only reason people want to use it anyway, it's fair enough that the public react when Ebay suggested they were making it the only available payment option. Let's just be glad that people power has won in this case!

On a couple of websites I've built I've wanted to change the default Drupal menu into something that closely resembles buttons.

For example:

This is easy to do using CSS.

The menus in Drupal are formatted as unordered lists using <ul> and <li>, with some funky CSS included in by default to give the standard bullets and arrows.

To create a blocky, CSS button look we need to overwrite the default CSS with some of our own. In theory it's not that difficult, but it took me a while of playing around to figure out what CSS rules needed to be overwritten.

I start all my themes with Zen, so I'm not sure if this CSS will work by default with other themes - give it a try.

In your theme's CSS file, add the code:

/* menu buttons */
.block-menu ul.menu,
.block-menu li.leaf,
.block-menu li.collapsed,
.block-menu li,
.block-menu .item-list ul,
.block-menu .item-list ul li {
    list-style: none;
    list-style-image: none;
    list-style-type: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}
.block-menu .block-inner a,
.block-menu .block-inner a:visited {
    color: #333;
    text-decoration: none;
    display: block;
    /*width: 168px;*/
    padding: 1px 6px;
    margin: 2px 0;
   
    border-width: 1px 1px 1px 8px;
    border-style: solid;
    border-color: #DDD;
   
    font-size: 0.9em;
}
.block-menu .block-inner a:hover {
    color: #FFFFFF;
    background-color: #880a0b;
    border-color: #880a0b;
}

Fill in your own colours, mess around with the margins and padding to suit your site and away you go!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Evangelism on the web

Evangelism is one of the most important parts of the church, and the internet can be used to help us with this task as much as the previous two uses mentioned.

Evangelism websites - like any other evangelism media - should be targeted at a specific group, meeting a need in a given community. If you've got a group in mind and you've thought of a fantastic way to reach them online, that's great. Be aware though, that starting an online ministry is a hard process if you don't have the real-world contacts to back it up. People won't visit your website unless they have a reason to look for it.

I guess what I am trying to say is – don't get confused into thinking that your church website has to be evangelistic, because it doesn't. Evangelism is a whole different sport.

Some things to think about if you're designing an evangelism website:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Building Community

“A true Web site is a gathering place – a watering hole that people
will go to so that they can meet other people who go there.”
- Leonard Sweet.

The internet is becoming a larger part of our culture. More than 50% of teenagers use the internet every day, with average usage for this age group at 1.5 hours per day. Gen X-ers, who are now well into their 30s and 40s, are also huge internet users, and even older generations are catching on.

My wife's grandfather bought a computer last year and in his mid 70s now browses the internet and uses email several times a week.

With more people spending more time online, it's no wonder that online communities are becoming popular.

Ebay is a good example. One of the largest internet companies, its user base covers all age groups, and part of its success is attributed not only to its buying and selling model but to the way it builds community. Through leaving feedback for others, posting in the forums or chatting in the “Ebay Cafe”, users interact with each other informally, sharing interests and building relationships.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Did you know that here in Australia we have 14 million internet users? In a country of 20 million or so people that's a lot. When you consider that a simple website can reach any of those people and costs less than a yearly ad in the yellow pages (in some cases it can cost nothing at all) it's an easy and important way for a church to express itself. The web is an opportunity that we should be taking advantage of, both as individual churches and as a whole.

In this series of short articles I want to talk about three ways that a church can utilise the internet through having its own website.

1. Advertising
2. Building Community (Covered in part 2)
3. Evangelising (Part 3)

 

1. Advertising

“The Internet is becoming the town square
for the global village of tomorrow.”
- Bill Gates

Here's an experiment. Unplug your mouse and monitor, and try to use your computer.

Even browsing the internet becomes next to impossible. Yet for many people who have sight problems or other physical disabilities, this is what they are faced with every day.

Our society is increasingly based around information, and the internet is by far our biggest tool for accessing that information. Many of us complete our education, get jobs, work, shop and play online, by filling in forms, typing our names and passwords, clicking buttons with the mouse and using keyboard shortcuts when we know them.

Making your website "Accessible" has come to mean "Making it easy for disabled people to access and navigate." Without sight, or perhaps paralyzed and unable to use a standard mouse or keyboard, many people use special software or hardware to help them move around the internet. An accessible site presents its design and content in such as way as to make it quick and easy for these special devices to navigate and present to the people using them.

Many of the websites I produce are dynamic. A lot of people don't know what this means - even the people I build them for - so I would like to give a simple definition and an explanation of when a dynamic site is needed and when it isn't.

Please note: this is a very simple explanation designed for people who are new to this concept. If you're after more, try wikipedia.

A simple definition.

The word 'dynamic' in this context means 'characterised by continuous change, activity, or progress'. In this way it can be applied to many things that display changing characteristics, for example 'it is a dynamic market'.

In the case of a website, to be dynamic means that content of the page has the potential to change every time the page is loaded.

For instance, a very simple dynamic site might show the time and date in the corner. This date stamp will automatically be updated every time a user loads the page so that it shows the correct date and time.

A website that is not 'dynamic' is considered 'static': every time it is loaded it will be the same.