Month: January 2015

In today’s age, owning your own domain is quite easy. Even the smallest parish should have a web presence. Registering and setting up a domain for your church is also a simple-and-easy process. Your domain name is a significant part of your web identity, and having your own domain name is a great way to make accessing your website simple. Keeping this in mind, using a name your community will recognize is important and worth some consideration beforehand.

In its simplest terms, a domain is the address of the website. For example, truepath.com is the domain name of this website. Most US domains end in .com, .net or .org. Websites ending in .com are commercial websites, and in fact, the .com stands for commercial. Domains with .net are specified as networks, and .org is for organizations including not-for-profits. Because of this, .org is usually the most common one chosen for Church websites. Domain names may consist of numbers, letters, and hyphens, and is not case sensitive – so typing in the name of Truepath.com is the same as entering truepath.com in your web browser’s address bar.

When registering a domain, it is usually best practice to register it with the company providing the hosting for your website. This registration process will often occur when you sign up for your new website hosting plan. Finding the right domain name is usually just a matter of finding good balance between clarity and brevity. Often, this boils down to nothing more than choosing the name of your church, but since many churches have longer names, abbreviations may be in order. If you do choose to use an abbreviation or acronym in your domain name, don’t forget periods or dots are not allowed in domain names. While you or I may abbreviate “First Assembly of God” as “f.a.o.g.”, the domain name should be written as “faog”, followed by .com or .org. Domain names can be up to 63 characters in length, so finding a good balance between a short, easy-to-remember name, and a lengthy, meaningful domain that is more difficult to type out usually isn’t very hard. For many people, writing out “First Assembly of God” might be more intuitive than typing out the acronym, but very lengthy church names might be worth abbreviating at least part of the name.

Whatever choice you make, though, keep in mind it is well worth the deliberation behind your domain name. Domain names cannot be returned for a refund or unregistered, so it is important to find the right one. While you can always purchase new domain names and change which ones point to your site, there is usually an extra cost that is incurred and may confuse parishioners who already visit your site regularly. Choosing the right domain name might seem tricky, but finding the right one is well worth the effort, and easy to set up once registered. Are you ready to choose your domain name? Start here!

There is an internet vulnerability discovered recently that you can read about in the link below. This vulnerability affects most of the web sites on the internet today.

http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/vulnerability-management/vert-alert-ghost-glibc-overflow/

Truepath is taking action by applying a patch to prevent a malicious user from taking advantage of the vulnerability. The web server your web pages are on will be rebooted as part of the fix, which means you may notice your web page will be inaccessible for up to 5 minutes.

Truepath is your Christian web host, and we work round the clock to ensure your website is up and running smoothly.

Reaching out to your community via email is a well-worn method for connecting with one’s parishioners and church members. There are several methods of creating a mass database of emails and contacting them all at once, but between manually compiling a list and carbon-copying (CC’ing) each one and using a more structured solution, like a mailing list, there really is no choice. Mailing lists are a time-tested solution that continue to be a solid choice for dissemination of information, especially as it changes. It’s much simpler to be able to send an email with a few keystrokes to tell the community that the time or location of an event has changed, and with mobile email, this is often enough to completely reschedule the event. In addition to being a great solution to manage a list of users, mailing lists are also user-friendly for the creator of the list as well.

When setting up a mailing list, it’s a great idea to use a solution with your email provider, rather than a built-in Outlook mailing list, or a third-party solution. In its simplest form, mailing lists simply send out a copy of an email to everyone on the list whenever anyone sends a message to the list email. For example, if user1@email.com and user2@email.com both send a separate message to list@email.com, both messages will be delivered to both recipients. This is called a discussion list and is used, appropriately, for discussion. With this type of list, it is a poor idea to make it publicly known. A discussion list posted on a live website will likely get thousands of spam messages a day in very quick order. Discussion lists generally function well when admission to the list is moderated by an administrator.

When a list is being used for a newsletter or some other type of proclamation, it is best to have one or two “moderators” who are allowed to send to the list, whereas everyone else can only read the content. Most mailing list software includes easy functionality for this type of configuration. Newsletter emails are used by many large companies because of the efficiency of spreading the necessary information.

Truepath offers a built-in mailing list software called EZLM. The documentation is provided here: http://hsphere.parallels.com/docs/3.3/user/html/mailing_lists.html. This is a straightforward tool that many use to communicate with their church members. It provides moderation, subscriber management, and even spam filtering. However, for those who want a more full-featured and complex tool, we recommend Google Groups. The Gmail equivalent of mailing lists, Google Groups provides much of the same functionality and is great to use for people who already have a Gmail address, or wish to use Google services.

Sending a single email to multiple users is often enough for many church administrators, but scaling such an operation is not a good solution. We recommend exploring the idea of a church email list as soon as a CC chain includes more than a few addresses. Often a mailing list is much simpler to “set and forget” without having to remember who all needs to be CC’d in on an email. Don’t let the barrier of learning a new process keep you from leveraging a mailing list to save your time and energy!