Facebook is a hot topic for churches that want to have a presence in social media, followed closely by Twitter and YouTube. We all know what Facebook is and that if you want to build community it’s a great tool to use. What most churches DON’T know is how to use Facebook to effectively reach our audience. At 12Stone we’re working on developing a strategy and setting up our Facebook communities to be successful but we don’t have it completely figured out yet.
While I do have some pretty good ideas about what an effective Facebook community looks like, there is another church out there that is already doing an outstanding job…Lifechurch.tv. As I’m creating a strategy for 12Stone I look at what Lifechurch is doing on their Facebook communities. They’ve made individual fan pages for each campus that they have, they’ve created custom HTML welcome pages and info pages.
First let me apologize for not being on schedule and getting this post up on Monday, but at least I’m still meeting my goal with blogging once a week posting.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been forced to re-evaluate how we host our online video. Due to changes in the billing of our current service provider Ooyala, I’m having to rethink my strategy. They use to bill per hour watched, they have changed to bill per gigabyte delivered. I am by no way upset by this, because all other companies are already billing this way and Ooyala has worked with us to try and keep us at the same pricing. However, just due to the fact that we record HD video even our little 3 minute clips are over 100mb.
Anyways, we are changing our strategy to only hosting our sermons on Ooyala and posting our short clips on Vimeo. The only thing I don’t like about Vimeo is that your username can’t start with a number… so obviously “12Stone” can’t be our username… We can pay only $60/year and get unlimited hosting for our HD video. Vimeo is also a little more socially friendly as people can share it directly, even download the video if we let them. There are ofcourse some limits:
I read through “HTML5 For Web Designers” this past week, if 85 pages isn’t short enough for you then this post should help shed a little light on HTML5.
A little history fun with tongue in cheek…
In the beginning was HTML 2.0 there was no HTML 1 and it wasn’t that good… W3C saw that it wasn’t good so they created HTML 4.01… It was better but it didn’t serve the W3C well so they created XHTML 1.0 which was the same as HTML 4.01 but it followed the rules. Jump forward about 10 years and XHTML 1.0 is getting left behind and the W3C are upgrading HTML 4.01 to a much needed HTML5.
Change that you can look forward to OLD vs. NEW
No more lengthy doctype!
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict //EN” “http://www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<!DOCTYPE html>
No longer have to include what type of file you’re referring to.
small – now has the semantic value for legalese, or terms and conditions
b – no longer conveys extra importance, instead use strong
i – no longer conveys extra importance or emphasis, instead use em
cite – now means “the title of a work”
canvas – new element for creating dynamic images (wanna know more, get the book)
mark – no added importance only shows that it’s currently of interest
time – can be used for dates, times, or combines both
section – used for grouping together thematically-related content
header – a container for a group of introductory or navigational aids
footer – should contain information about its containing element, such as copyrights
aside – chunk of content that you consider separate from the main content
article – self-contained related content, such as a blog post
nav – intended for major navigation information
Web Forms, SEO and Internet Explorer
A lot has been done with Web Forms, I won’t get too much into detail but just imagine not having to use javascript to make your forms work correctly!
The outlining algorithm of HTML documents is changing… blockquote, fieldset, and td elements are all immune to the new algorithm. For all you developers out there still using tables to create a web layout… this would be a good reason to stop, it means that your code flooded with <td> is worthless to anyone that wants some kind of SEO capability.
Ofcourse this is a very brief overview of this book, I recommend getting it and reading through all of the in depth uses for the new code. Just remember, it will be a few years before HTML5 is widely used, in Internet Explorer’s case it probably won’t be used until 10 years from now…
Pulling some great advice that I got from John Saddington in a post last October, I’ve decided it’s time to really make this a good blog worth your time.
4 Ingredients for a Good Blog
Have a schedule
Less about passion & more about discipline
Have goals
Team effort
So here it is, I’m going to start off with some easy goals and re-evaluate them next year…
For a schedule, I will be posting once a week on Monday’s.
While I will continue to have passion about what I discuss I will be using this as a tool to help others with their online ministry and overall marketing, social media, web design, etc. It’s NOT about passion but you do NEED passion if you want to make a difference.
My goal is simple, if I can help just one person advance their knowledge and skills then it’s worth it!
The ingredient that I’m missing right now… team effort. I don’t have a team that works with me but if you’re interested in blogging for free about anything having to do with online ministry then email me.
Featuritis – an infectious desire for MORE, afflicts everyone from the CEO to the programmer. The ability to subtract features is the rare gift of the true communicator, while the tendency to add features comes naturally. Have you ever heard the saying “You can be really good at one thing, or you can be okay at many things”? Think about that for a minute… The sites that have succeeded are the ones that focus on ONE thing. Flickr – upload/share photos, YouTube – upload/share videos, Twitter – share quick thoughts.
Remember all those cliches, less is more, simpler is better, clean is mean…well maybe not that last one. If you want to have everything and the kitchen sink on your website, then go for it! Just don’t expect everyone and their momma to come and marvel at it’s beauty. [smile]
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