Uncategorized :: Affordable Church Website Program

SSL & Encryption Changes Will Affect Almost All Sites

January 5th, 2017

You can read our full post below, but here’s the quick version for the time-challenged:

Changes being made by Google and web browsers in January 2017 make it almost certain that your church website needs an SSL certificate (green padlock) soon.

Longer version with more details:

You may not have noticed yet, but more and more of the web is moving toward having green padlocks in the browser address bar. You get that green padlock by installing an SSL certificate, which encrypts (makes private) the data sent back and forth between a website and a website visitor. Until recently, it was generally only websites that processed financial transactions that needed an SSL.

For at least the last year, Google and other major players have been encouraging everyone to put an SSL on their website, whether the site processes financial transactions or not. Part of the rationale is that even things like passwords users enter to login to accounts should be encrypted. Additionally, with increased concerns about privacy, users benefit from having their site visits encrypted – it’s very easy to “see” anything a site visitor does on an unencrypted site, while on an encrypted site, those monitoring the site visit (either maliciously or as a part of legal surveillance) can only see that a site visitor has spent time on your site, but not actually what pages they viewed or activity they engaged in on your site.

It has been announced in the last few weeks that two changes are coming very soon to more strongly encourage the move to SSL and encrypted websites. First, sometime in January, Chrome and other web browsers will start adding a “not secure” notification in the address bar of websites that do not have an SSL. Initially, this will only be on pages where passwords or credit cards are entered, but it will be coming soon to ALL unencrypted webpages. It will look like this – the top is what it looks like currently, the bottom is how it will begin appearing:

This “not secure” notification is likely to scare at least some visitors off your website, especially if you take donations on your website — even if you send your donors to PayPal to complete the transaction. But more broadly, the “not secure” notification is likely to make users leery of submitting any form on your website, whether or not money is involved — for instance even your “contact us” form. No one wants their email address or phone number, or even just their name to be accessed by hackers.

Additionally, beginning sometime in January, Google will begin to demote in search engine rankings websites that are not secured with an SSL. If you have a concern about appearing in search results with your site, you will want to install an SSL. If you are not a part of ACWP, the simplest way to get started is to contact your hosting company for help in getting an SSL installed.

Our normal fees for SSL’s on sites with financial transactions are $150 per year (certificate + installation labor). A portion of that certificate fee is insurance coverage that covers fraudulent financial transactions. IF your website does not process financial transactions on the site, we are able to offer under our ACWP hosting program a lower-cost SSL certificate that will encrypt your site, avoiding both the “not secure” notification and the lowered search engine rankings for $60 per year. This SSL would NOT include insurance for fraudulent financial transactions. If you use PayPal for donations or payments, your site would be eligible for this lower-cost SSL since with PayPal, users are taken to the PayPal site to complete their transaction.

When would you NOT want to add this non-financial SSL? If your church is small (averages less than 75 persons at worship), and you have no plans or hopes for growth or new members, you may decide to delay adding an SSL for now. Google has announced that there will be increasing pressure in the future to move toward SSL for all websites, but small churches not hoping for growth can put this off for a bit.

If your church wants to be able to process financial transactions on your website (not just donations, but any payments for events, etc.), you would want to install a full SSL with insurance against fraud.

If you have any questions about SSL’s, what will be happening with Google and browser warnings, or how ACWP might be able to help with your site, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.

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Avoiding Image Copyright Issues

April 4th, 2016

Most people know that it’s easy to find images by searching Google Image Search. But not all the images you find through such a search are legal to use. Here are some tips and tools for avoiding copyright issues.

When you find an image that seems perfect for a page or post of your website – say, a mouth-watering picture of pancakes for that article about the pancake breakfast fundraiser – look at the website where the picture is being displayed.

Obviously, if the picture is from the IHOP website, it’s going to be copyrighted. But sometimes, other people have violated copyright law to use IHOP’s photo, so just because it’s on someone’s blog doesn’t mean that it’s fair game. You (and your organization) are responsible for the images you use on your site, and the fines can be thousands of dollars.

A very helpful tool is TinEye.com, a reverse image search. On their site, you can either upload an image file, or paste in the URL of the photo that you found on Google Image, and TinEye will show you all the places on the web where that picture occurs. Then you can look for indications that the image might be copyrighted. For instance, you should be able to see if an image is a stock photo being sold on a service like istockphoto.com or gettyimages.com.

One helpful tip is to sort your TineEye.com search results by date, displaying the oldest results first. This should give you some indications about where the photo might have originated, but should not be taken as definitive, since stock photo sites might have been reorganized and changed their URLs, so you might not see this particular photo appearing on the stock photo site until later in date.

TinEye Makes browser add-ins for all the major website browsers, which makes searching images even easier. Once you have the added installed and activated, you only need to right-click on an image and then choose “Search Image on TinEye”. The search results will open in a new tab or window.

Have questions about copyrights for images? Leave your question in the comments.

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Let Your Theme Keep You Looking Good!

November 15th, 2015

THE one thing that will help your website look more professional and less “home-made” is to have consistency of fonts, colors & spacing. If you don’t override it, your WordPress theme helps you with this. When a user calls up one of your pages, it tells the browser to display all the body (main area) content in a certain font, font color & font size. And it does the same with other elements of your site, including the spacing around those elements.

One way that you might inadvertently override your theme is when you cut & paste content into the content editor. WordPress has gotten a lot better at keeping “just the basics”, but sometimes you can still pull formatting that you didn’t intend to into a post or page. When that happens, just select that text, and click on the “Clear formatting” button on the bottom row of editor tools (don’t see a bottom row? then click on the “Toolbar Toggle” button at the right end of the top row). This should clear the formattting. If it doesn’t, cut that text out of the editor, paste it into a plain text editor like Notepad, copy it again (the formatting will have been removed), and paste back into WordPress.

Sometimes, website editors intentionally override the theme in an attempt to emphasize text. This almost always comes off in an unprofessional way. See this article on how to emphasize text “without seeming desperate or deranged”. Use all caps, bold and italics to make your point. These should get displayed in the font of your theme, and even if that theme gets changed should still emphasize in the same way. There is almost never a good reason to change the color of the font with the WP editor–say to red–which will certainly make your text stand out, but will not look good.

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Get Google Apps for Nonprofits for Free

November 7th, 2015

You can use domain-based email (office@mychurch.org), as well as other great Google services by applying for a free Google Apps for Nonprofits account. Google offers verfied 501(c)3 nonprofits free Google Apps accounts. Normally, you would pay $5/month per email address or $50/year, so this is a great value.

You can find more info here, but the short story is that you will need to complete an application process, then setup Google Apps (verify your domain, and then set up accounts). Verifying your domain can be a little tricky if you are tech-challenged, but Google offers several ways to do this.

Google does not ask for your IRS 501(c)3 letter, but instead asks for your EIN (IRS Employer Identification Number). The snag for most local faith communities is that their EIN may not be in the IRS database of charitable organizations, even though they have a letter as a 501(c)3. Most local congregations are however, covered under a group EIN from their denominational body—as long as the “deductability status” of that organization in the database is “Group”, which extends to subordinate units. Obviously, you shouldn’t use the denomination’s EIN for paying employees or filing taxes, but this seems to be the best way to work within the Google Apps for Nonprofits system.

Google Apps offers a really great tool for migrating all the emails from your old email hosting over into Google Apps. Contacts and calendars can be exported and imported in. In addition to email, calendars & contacts, Google Apps includes Google Drive (for sharing/collaborating on documents & spreadsheets), and many other tools.

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Managing Menus in WordPress

October 18th, 2015

You have successfully created a new page for your WordPress website, now how do you get it into the menu? Since WordPress released version 3.0, menus now have a drag-and-drop functionality, making it simple to add and delete pages from your menu.

Just follow these steps:

Find the menu management page by looking under Appearance – Menus in the dashboard.
Look for a new page that you have created under the “Pages” section of the narrower left side of the Edit Menus page. In the Pages section you can search for pages, but the default should show your Most Recent pages. Usually, any new page that you have created is the topmost item in the list.
Place a check in the boxes for the pages that you would like to add to your menu, and click the button “Add to Menu”.
Now look at the bottom of the section titled “Menu Structure” – the wider main part of the Edit Menus page. The page(s) you just added should now appear at the bottom.
Drag-and-drop the pages you added to the location you would like them to appear on your menu. (The top is the left side of your menu, and the bottom is the right.) To make a page a sub-page, simply indent it from the main level page items – it should snap into place as indented. You can also add sub-sub-pages in the same way.
Remember to click the “Save Menu” button, then go back to a friend-facing page of your website and refresh. You should see your new menu item.
To delete a page, open it’s item by clicking on the down-arrow on the right side. You can “Remove” the item there. This will not affect the actual page, just the item for that page in your menu.

Tips & Troublehooting

If you don’t see your new menu item immediately, try a hard refresh of your page by holding the Ctrl key and pressing F5. To eliminate any caching issues, delete your browser cache and/or check your menu on another device.
If you still don’t see your new menu item after eliminating caching issues, check to make sure that you edited the correct menu. It is possible to have more than one menu, and perhaps you are changing the one not in use. (If this is the case, once you have everything fixed, it’s best to eliminate any unneeded menus to avoid future confusion.)
You can have the same page appear more than once in your menu, simply added a second time in drag-and-drop it where you would like it to appear. For instance, if your site is very large, you might want your “Contact” page to appear both as a main level menu item and as a sub-page of About.
If you have a long page title that you would like to shorten, or if you have another reason for changing the menu label, you can do this by opening the menu item (click the down-arrow on the right), and editing the “Navigation Label”.
You can create a menu item for a PDF or for the page of a separate website, by opening the Links section on the left side of the Edit Menus page (right under Pages). The URL for your uploaded PDF or the page you would like to send people to (don’t forget to include the http://), and add the text for the menu item label.
If you are using Categories on the posts in your site, you can create a menu item for a single category. For instance, if some of the posts in your site have a category of “Youth Ministry”, in the Categories section of the menu editing page, you can create a menu item for this category. When clicked, the user will see only posts with a category of Youth Ministry.
Avoid menus that are too long! You definitely don’t want to have any of your menus wrap onto a second line – that looks tacky. And having more than seven or eight main level menu items becomes overwhelming for the user. Keep your menu streamlined!
You also want to keep your main level menu items “main level” – in other words, the most general categories, in order to help your site users navigate around your content. Resist the temptation to promote events in your menu– use the sidebar for this.

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Change the Order Posts Appear in WP

October 5th, 2015

If you use the blog function of your WordPress site as a news feed, or if you are using the Recent Posts widget (like we do in the sidebar, below signups), you might occasionally want to change the order of the posts – either in the blog or the widget.

The ordering of the posts in both of these locations is automatically controlled, and determined solely by the date of publication. Older posts automatically appear at the bottom, while the newest post automatically appears at the top – a “reverse chronological” structure.

To change the order where a post appears, you need to change the date of publication for that post – making it earlier in date than the posts you would like it to appear below, and later in date than the posts you would like it to appear above.

To change the date of publication for post, go to the post editing page, and on the right sidebar, immediately above the blue “Update” button, look for the “Published on:” line. Right beside that will be a blue link to “Edit”. Click this link, then select a new publication date. Be aware that you may have to select a time as well as a date of publish to get your post exactly where you want it.

While changing the order of the posts in the blog or widget might be something you need to do once in a while, you don’t want to end up micromanaging this order too much. Changing the order more than once a month or so might mean that you need to take a look at creating a publishing schedule to be more organized in the order you originally publish posts.

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Add a Facebook “button”

September 28th, 2015

If your church has a Facebook Page, you should definitely make sure that your website visitors can find it! Here’s how to make Facebook buttons on your site:

On the web, a button is really just an image (that looks like a button) that has a link (to the webpage the button will open) associated with it. The “Find us on Facebook” image just above has had our ACWP FB Page connected to it, so that if you click on that image, it will take you to our Facebook Page.

Here are the steps to putting up a FB button on your WordPress site:

Download a FB button image to your computer. Right-click on the image above (or the one to the right, or any other FB button image you like), and look for the option to “Save Image As”. This will open up the dialog box to save the image file. Save the file in a location where you can find it.
Go to the page or post where you will be creating the button (in our ACWP sites with “Widget Content” managers, you can also create buttons in Widget Content posts too).
Upload the image file, just as you would normally upload an image, but right under where you would set the alignment (right, left or center), look for a drop-down to choose the “Link to”. By default, this will be set at “Media File”. Instead, choose “Custom URL”.
Now immediately below the “Custom URL’ choice, you should see the box ready for the URL of your FB Page. Open another browser page or tab and go to your Facebook Page. Copy the URL to your clipboard, and go back to the Insert Image overlay to paste it in. Then click “Insert into Post”.
If you need to resize the button a bit, it’s okay to click on the image and drag-and-drop the corners, just like a regular image in WP.
Finally, click “Publish” or “Update”.

By the way, it’s a good idea to put how to find you on FB in your print media too — your bulletins & print newsletters. Be sure to tell them exactly the name of your FB Page– are you “First UMC, Smallville” or “First United Methodist of Smallville” or “FUMC, Smallville”?

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