Create a Mobile, PDA-Friendly Version of Your Church Website in Minutes

Mark Alves Content Ideas

With all the mobile announcements today (the new Treo 680, Google’s mobile maps and Mossberg’s review of the Sony Reader), let’s look at how to make a mobile version of your church website. In just a few steps you can reach out to those parishioners using PDAs, Avantgo or browsing on a smart phone.

Design It

1. Pick a short URL. Your parishioners may be typing it in on a mini-keyboard or a phone pad. Yoursite.org/pda or /togo or even /m are good choices. /smartphoneversion isn’t.

2.Start with a blank web page. It can have a .html extension, .php or whatever it is you use on the rest of your site. Add the following meta tag in the head of your code:

<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True">

3. Keep the formatting short and plain to work with small screens. Avoid tables. Use default fonts and don’t try to set point sizes or fiddle much with the style since you won’t have much control over the rendering on small devices.

4. Don’t eat up a lot of space with navigation on all the pages. Have your main content on the PDA home page as a bulleted navigation list and let parishioners use their back buttons to get around.

Add Existing Content

This isn’t going to be your main gateway so find content you already have on your main church site, such as:

  • Main contacts
  • Driving directions
  • Mass schedule
  • Maybe even a subway map

That’s your set-it-and-forget-it content. If you can do weekly updates, try:

  • Sunday bulletins (plain text, not PDF!)
  • Homilies
  • Major events

You can cut-and-paste those in to the same pages as updates become available. Or you can use an include-statement to pull in your content from a database or other source. On the St. Charles Borromobile site, for example, homilies are pulled from the same file used for the printer-friendly version on the main site, which requires only one line of code to change.

Make a Date

One last thing—include a “last updated” note on the PDA home page. Our users have commented this lets them know whether they need to refresh/resync or not.

UPDATED December 11, 2006
Include your parish’s phone number on your mobile homepage since most phone-based browsers will automatically turn telephone numbers into clickable links. It’s a great option for visitors who, already having a phone in their hands, may want more information.

4 More Reasons to Use Google Groups to Build Faith Communities

Mark Alves Email

Google announced enhancements to Google Groups that make the free product even better for supporting e-newsletters and discussions with your faith communities. The improvements cover four areas:

  1. Create shared web pages – collaborative web pages within the group without having the members needing to know HTML.
  2. Pick your own colors, fonts, logos – such as to match your own website.
  3. File sharing and collaboration – central location to work on shared documents, rather than repeatedly blasting out attachments; good-bye version control problems; also includes subscriber profiles for those who want to share personal details within the group.
  4. Flexible discussions – easier to reply to specific threads or to start separate sub-discussions.

This move puts Google ahead of Yahoo Groups, which previously offered a better selection of community-building tools, but with a heavy-handed emphasis on getting you to sign up for a Yahoo ID. That inflexibility made me recommend Google Groups for my parish’s listservs when we were looking for a solution to replace dreadful Topica a few years ago.

Give Google Groups a(nother) look if you want the benefits of e-newsletters or discussion groups without having the enormous burden of manually managing the subscription/unsubscription process.

Catholic House Blessings–Don’t Forget the Dorms, Apartments and Condos

Mark Alves Content Ideas

One of the most visited sections of my parish’s web site, www.StCharlesChurch.org, is the DIY house blessing. Even if you don’t have a priest on hand, you can self-bless your own place following these guidelines from the US Bishops. I posted the instructions and prayers it in 2002 and four years later it consistently shows up in the top 5 of our most visited pages.

To make the blessing resonate with our young, urban community, I included references to ‘roommates’ and ‘friends’ in the original description. Turns out I missed a category. A terrific article in Sunday’s Washington Post about blessing dorm rooms at Catholic University prompted me to amend the description today to include ‘dorm rooms.’

As Fr. Donald Planty used to say when performing such a prayer, “Let’s bless the hell out of this house.”