Reaching out…

Every organization has the glossy brochure about the organization and Young Life is no different. For us (Young Life), it is pictures of multicultural kids having a great time, probably getting sprayed by water, or eating an ice cream cone that is bigger than their head. Classic stuff, stuff that makes you laugh and draws you in. Every organization needs to have the website that talks about the core values, when meetings take place, how people can get involved, and my favorite… “Who wants to give online?” button.

Young Life has run ahead of the curve by creating the technology for each area to have a local site. providing a lot of content but also controlling a lot of content.  I was an early adopter but was stifled by some of the limitations.  Jim Caldwell, Area Director in Ballard was a slower adopter, but has seen great success out of the pre-packaged Young Life website. He said we sat down and spent a lot of time on the content, getting it right, and then published it to the web. He said we did it once, but have had an incredible return on our efforts. It has been a great way to screen leaders, connect with churches and just be part of the community. He said the majority of his leads for leaders come through the Northeast Seattle website.

Advantages:

• Young Life has done a great job with SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing ) listing sites with the search engines, other organizations may not have the same benefit.
• Packaged organizational website are usually clean and cookie cutter to set up
• People want and expect to know Service times, phone numbers, available ministries etc… These provide that.

Now not all organizations have the IT department of Young Life, what are the other technical options

Step 1: Who is gonna work on it?

Solution #1: Who do we know?

Not everyone has a out of box, the national organization gave us this tool so we will use it sort of solution.  There are quite a few organizations that have to do it on their own, I call it the “Bootstraps” approach, meaning, they will get a site done and it will get done if by nothing else their sheer determination.  Often there is someone in the church body or connected to the ministry that has a son in law who roommate is a graphic designer, and that person could put something together in Front Page for them. Although this looks likes its failproof at first, upon reflection there may be a few hiccups along the road. Typically what happens is the roommate’s friend get called up for the National Guard, and Blam-O the website is down, or at least out of date, because you have gone from One service to Two, or changed the church phone number, location etc…

Solution #2: Drop about a cool “thou” on a clean site.

Often this is a safe solution, when we pay, people respond, or at least that is the hope. The more you pay the more reputable the outcome. Now, most ministries are not swimming in income, so this is a hard decision… parting with your money. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Then it dawns on you… how do you find the right person? Are they Christian? Does that matter? You start googling, and typically either through that web search through someone you know you find someone to work on the site, and typically your organization is left with pretty nice looking website, that promotes your organization but you are left empty wondering, maybe just maybe I could have found someone who would have done this for free.

Solution #3: Enroll at Bellevue Community College

The other option and often the most successful option is to spend the energy learning about the medium of a website. So enrolling at BCC, and learning about things like FTP, HTTP and HTML and although they seem like a foreign language right now, even if someone else is creating your website, know what you are talking about is usually a good thing.

Step 2:  What is that you want?

The more time that passes the more that I fall in love with Content Management Systems, or (CMS) is what they call it in the industry. They have been around for a while, but are maturing. There are several CMS-based applications available, both fee-based and open sourced. More and more this is the direction that the industry is moving in, because it put the power of content in the hands of the person who is creating it. There is always a struggle between the techno-file, who loves making things, because they are cool, and the consumer who really just wants a working product that makes their life easier. This is even true within the CMS world, the core functionality that I am promoting here is for the user (YOU) to be able to login to your website through your browser and update pages directly. The following is a non-comprehensive list of CMS-based systems:

Fee-based:

• Windows Sharepoint

Open Source:

• Joomla ( http://www.joomla.org )
• Drupal ( http://www.drupal.org )
  
• Dot Net Nuke ( http://www.dotnetnuke.org )
• Mambo ( http://www.mambor.org )
• Xoops ( http://www.xoops.org )
• WordPress ( http://www.wordpress.org )
  

We selected Drupal for our Church site ( http://www.ptfbc.org ) and a ministry that I like to support ( http://www.powerofconnecting.com ), both very different sites, both powerful and simple to use administratively.  And yes, it takes a bit of setup, but once setup, it has a lot of robust functionality, and a simple interface for very easy and intuitive updates.

The real advantage to a CMS-based solution is that you control your own content, when you log into the website, you make a change and you propagate the change publicly by saying “publish”.  And you don’t have to know the ins and outs of the Internet for this to work. You can add a page by clicking a button and change the layout of the site by clicking another.

Learning about the offered features and then making some decision as to how you are going to use the site is gonna be the key here. Things that I love but not everyone does:

• Image Gallery
• Blog
• Calendar
• Contact form
• Analytics integration

The other option is what we call a “static” site. This amounts to HTML files being saved to a web server and made public for the world to see them. They are low in interactivity and even lower in the ability to have them changed. They are quick to create to a pain to modify.