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”?
Dealing With Spam Comments
Of course, you can eliminate spam comments by turning off the comments on your posts. To do this on your WordPress site, look on the left menu of the admin dashboard under Settings for Discussion. Under “Default Article Settings”, uncheck the box “Allow people to post comments on new articles”.
But leaving comments turned on can generate some conversation about your posts, which is a good thing. We advise leaving our default setting that before a comment appears on your site, that “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”. This means that the first time a commenter writes a comment, a notification will go to the post author (by default in WP this is set to the site administrators, but in ACWP, we notify post authors) to approve. After that, comments from that person (identified by their email address) will appear without needing approval.
You can lock down comments a little tighter by requiring that all comments must be “moderated” or manually approved before they appear on the site.
All our ACWP sites use Akismet, a spam filter for blog comments. It catches quite a large percentage of spam comments. But sometimes, you’ll get a notice asking for you to approve a comment that is clearly spam. Your post was about your church’s upcoming pancake breakfast, and the comment thanks you for all your pointers regarding buying used cars.
You might be tempted to just delete (“trash”) this comment, but it’s important to instead mark this comment as spam. Akismet is a dynamic filter, and can “learn” to better identify spam comments when you mark the comments that escaped its filter as spam.
We are discovering that on our church sites we occasionally get comments that seem “too personal” to be approved– not inappropriate, but things that should probably get handled through more private email channels, not out in public on the website. Like someone requesting a refund on an event ticket…
All in all, what we really see is that there aren’t really very many comments at all on the blog-as-a-newsfeed type posts.
What is your experience with blog comments?
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