In addition, International Missions will stream special events on www.fwbgo.com.  On Monday afternoon, July 19, at 3:00 p.m., the Mission will host 75 Years of Faithfulness, honoring our overseas workers who have served in global evangelism efforts.  Tuesday morning, July 20, at 10:00 a.m., World Celebration 2010 will take place, recognizing our international guests.

The live feed from the convention services may also be syndicated on your church or associational website at no cost to you. If you are a webmaster with ftp access to your website, you may download the code and video player here. Because streaming is handled by an external server, viewing the feed on your website will not overload the bandwidth on your website.

Projector Give Away!

The Media Commission will give away a brand-new Toshiba LCD projector (model TLP-X100U) at the Free Will Baptist national convention, July 19-22 in Cincinnati. This compact, super light-weight XGA projector offers a multitude of inputs, plus HDTV/DTV and closed caption compatibility at resolutions up to 1024 x 768 at 2200 lumens. The retail value is as much as $700. This projector would be ideal for a small church just starting out with a projection system or for portable use in a large classroom.

You must register in person by filling out a brief response card at the Media Commission booth (#217) in the exhibit hall (open Monday 3:30 pm til Wedneday 9:30 pm) during the convention. The drawing for the grand prize takes place Wednesday evening. You are not required to be present in the hall at the time of the drawing, but if you win, we would prefer you make arrangements to pick up the projector before leaving Cincinnati.

Antioch, TN—Free Will Baptist International Missions is pleased to announce a redesigned, interactive, and customizable website. The refreshed site experienced a soft launch April 17, 2009. “The new design is fresh, clean, and exciting” said Deputy Director of Stateside Development Mark McPeak. “We want our website to work for all segments of our denomination and deliver the tools individuals and churches need to be involved and informed.”

An uncluttered front page, as well as new graphics and a fresh color scheme, immediately alerts visitors to the changes. “One of the most exciting features to me,” stated Kiley Hawkins, the Mission’s development manager, “ is the new MyIM settings. Each user can customize the material fed to his home page by setting up a MyIM account and choosing the information in which he is most interested and missionaries he wants to follow.” Preferences and demographic information can be changed and updated at any time. Online giving and ordering is simplified for MyIM users.

Missionaries have more tools to add content to their pages. Streaming video, interactive features, and the personalized settings for each user (MyIM) take international missions communication to the next level. Weekly prayer updates, the latest news from missionaries, and creative ways to be involved are at visitors’ fingertips. Mission history can be read and written on the interactive FWBIM Timeline. Videos about recent mission initiatives, events, and celebrations can be streamed or downloaded. In addition, the site contains basic information about the organization, with links and contact information to help users stay connected to missionary personnel at home and abroad.

“I urge everyone to visit fwbgo.com and set up a MyIM account, browse missionary pages, watch a video, and send us feedback,” encouraged Deborah St. Lawrence, communications manager.

Over the coming days and weeks I will begin a 5 part series dealing with topics that can help ANY size church begin to use multi media for the first time or simply increase your church’s effectiveness when it comes to multi-media. Topics will include:

1. Planning – The nuts and bolts of equipment selection, budgeting, and installation issues.

2. Vision – The art of casting vision for a multi-media ministry and how to bring change without breaking the unity of the church.

3. Funding – How to do multi-media on any budget and how to raise funds to start a successful multi-media ministry in less time than you think.

4. Staff – How to build a team of dedicated volunteers to help run your new ministry. We will also address topics related to paid staff vs volunteer.

5. The Long Haul – How to continue to build and sustain a growing media ministry for tomorrow’s church.

I hope these topics have sparked your interest and you will check fwbmedia.com often to see what other fwbs are saying about these and many other topics affecting the church today.

You will still need the cable that has the 3.5 mm plug to RCA plugs that is connected between your computer and sound board.  However, you will need to change the 3.5 mm plug to the “output” of the computer sound card and the RCA cables will need to be in the “input” of  the sound board.  Using software such as Musicmatch Jukebox or Windows Media Player, you can play audio from your computer through your church sound system.

A word of warning: The computer volume DOES indeed affect the volume going through the church sound system.  Trust me on this, I have experience in accidentally cranking up the computer volume. 

To remedy this issue, we connected our sound board into our computer.  To do this, you need the following:

1.  Cable:  3.5mm Mini Plug to RCA
2.  Computer Software for recording audio:  Audacity

On your church sound board, find an RCA audio output.  Connect the “red and white” RCA cable into this jack.  Connect the other end of the cable (the end with the 3.5 mini plug) into the “audio line-in” on your computer soundcard.  As far as the connections, you are ready to go.

However, you still need software in order to record the audio onto your computer.  You can go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and download the FREE audio sound-editor “Audacity.”  I’ve used this program for a few years and it has greatly served my needs.  The program is pretty straightforward and easy to use.  Audacity allows you to record audio and then convert the file(s) to WAV or MP3.

We often use this setup to record sound effects for plays & dramas at the church.  A few years ago, we used Audacity to record our church’s radio broadcast.  Using a computer microphone, the Pastor was able to record his teachings directly into Audacity and then I was able to mix soft music into the background to create a professional radio broadcast.  The folks at the radio station were amazed at the quality!

If your computer has a CD recorder, you can dump the WAV files onto a CD to play in your CD player.

This is a quick and easy setup that can be done for under $10 (taking into consideration you already have a computer and sound board with audio outputs).

The church now has a CD/Cassette recorder combo that was purchased from Long’s Electronics.  Although a little pricy, this unit has proven to be a workhorse for our audio recording needs.  We can dub from cassette to CD and from CD to cassette with the push of a button.  The CD also has a feature that will automatically begin recording the next track when there is a momentary pause in the audio.

All in all, we are very pleased with the transition to CD recordings.  As compared to cassettes, CD storage is also a great spacesaver!

My next post will be on recording worship services on the computer.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about church websites is that sometimes they are not optimized for search engines.  Here’s a few ideas that may help you out:

1.  Page Titles: Look at the home page of your church website.  What is the title of the page?  Is it New Page 1 or Home?  This seems to be common on some of the sites I have visited.  Page titles help engines to identify your site.  Use something that is descriptive of the content on that page.

2. Pictures vs. Text: Some sites use pictures in place of text so that fonts are not lost and to ensure the same look and feel across browsers.  The problem with this is that Google or Yahoo will not be able to index the text that is created as a picture.  This will make it harder for search engines to index the content of your website.  Do your best to use actual text when possible, it will ultimately help others find your site.

3. Meta Tags: Meta tags can also be of value, though I’m not so sure that they are as important as they used to be.  With metatags you can describe your site by keywords and by phrases.  Click here if you’d like to learn more about meta tags.

4. Site Maps: Sitemaps are a good way to help engines index your site the way you want.  Later on we’ll try to devote a whole post to creating your own Sitemap, but if you’re in a hurry, you can checkout Google’s help page on Sitemaps.

What other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips have you found helpful?

Website Tips

I’ve been looking around the web at some of our Free Will Baptist websites.  (You can check them out by clicking on the “Church Links” above.)  Some are very well done. Others could use a little help. I’m hoping this series of posts will give some tips that can help the average church webmaster.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Travis Penn and I’m the pastor at Calvary Free Will Baptist Church in Salem, Illinois. For a long time I was a bi-vocational pastor serving Calvary as well as working for our local elementary school as their technology coordinator.

I enjoy working on websites and blogging. I’m not a professional by any means. The following tips in this series are just some ideas that I have found useful. I hope to improve some of my own sites with these tips as well.

If you would like to help make some of my sites better, please feel free to check them out.

• www.CalvaryFreeWill.com is our Church website.
• www.ilfwb.org is the Illinois State Association website. It’s about to undergo a massive overhaul.  Ideas would be greatly appreciated.
• www.theHeightsChurch.us is a recent project I’ve been developing.

I hope that you’ll post tips that have been helpful to you in the comments section as well.  Our desire as the Media Commission is to help our churches do better with media. Hopefully we can work together and everyone can improve their web presence.

For starters let’s look for the obvious. When someone visits your church website, can they find…?

1. Your Address. It’s amazing how many websites don’t have their address on the front page of their website. It’s pretty common anymore to put it in a footer; that way it’s easy to find since it shows up on all of your pages.

2. Your Phone Number. Okay, I know what you’re saying.  This is the web, shouldn’t they email me? There are still a lot of folks who want to talk on the phone, and putting your phone number on the front page of your site makes it easy for them to contact you.  And for those of you who rarely check your email, this becomes a high priority.

3. A Contact Email Address. It’s helpful to have a contact email on the front so it’s easy for people to send you a message.  A point of advice here, you may want to use an address besides your personal address. Often these contact addresses receive a lot of spam. I would encourage most people to setup a Google Apps for Your Domain account to handle something like this.   (We’ll get to this in another post)

4. Directions / Map. There are many options here, but a simple link to a map can be very helpful.

5. Service Times. What time do things start? I shouldn’t have to navigate 4 levels into your site to find out when your worship service begins. Again, just make it easy.