If you’ve ever been in a room of software or developer geniuses, you know how intimidating tech talk can be. It’s full of acronyms and nicknames: AJAX, dither, cache, HTML tags, and it goes on and on. It can almost feel like they’re speaking a foreign language––and you’re caught in the middle trying to process the conversations.
Most industries have words and phrases that might confuse newcomers (and in the church, we’ve got lots of jargon, too!). Working as a church communicator, you have the unenviable task of learning both languages. Your work on the church website (and its online presence, in general) means you’ll need a basic understanding of the technical lingo used by website developers and programmers.
To start off on the right foot, I want to say congratulations for being here to learn! You should never have to feel embarrassed if you don’t know what a specific term means. You’re here to find out––and that’s an awesome step in the right direction. Every church is different. Some are very technical. Others aren’t! No matter where your understanding of the website worlds starts, you have room to grow.
Our new glossary is a great resource for getting a grasp on the words we (and other techies) use when talking about websites. But to help you actually apply these concepts and terms in your church, we’ve got a deep-dive of 8 of the most confusing ones:
The point of your navigation isn’t just organizing your website’s content. You need to use it to direct users to the answers/tools they need in as few steps as possible. Menu navigation best practice is to have only one main “nav,” with no more than one secondary one. You also want to be sure that every section has a purpose: don’t repeat the same information all over your site in different places. For example, if one of your members wanted to find more information on joining a small group, they should be able to find that in two or three simple, clear steps. And your small group finder should be located in just one easy-to-find spot. See more about how your church’s members use “paths” on your website (and what that means for how you can help them grow).
Most questions communicators have on domain names aren’t just, “What is it?” They’re more in-depth questions, like, “What happens when I change domains?” Or, “How do we change our email addresses to the new domain name?”
You can change domains with a name registrar, like namecheap.com or godaddy.com. Once you have a domain name you like, and you’re ready to launch your new site with Ekklesia360, you have two options.
Option #1: For the more tech-savvy, We can give you the IP address information so you can login to your domain name registrar and change the A record to make your URL point to the new site hosted with us.
Option #2: We are happy to update the DNS (domain name services) settings for you if you give us access to your domain name registrar account.
Changing over email addresses to a new domain is a very common (and possible) thing! We can help make sure that your email still comes through once you've switched over to Ekklesia360 hosting.
Note: The above is the “easy” version. For more detailed info about the launch process, read our article and see our FAQ.
That’s it! They’re very similar acronyms, but each software performs a very different service. Now that you know the difference between them, you can consider the available options that would work best for your church. See more here.
“A Style Guide is a set of formatting standards you set to maintain a consistent tone, feel, and ‘brand’ across all of the messaging and content for your specific site.” You can see an example of all the available styles a style guide can have here.
Before you start to enter content on your website, you (or probably your designer and developer) will make style sheets to determine the design and look of your website. In an e360 Theme, these are already set up. In a custom project, you can have input on these decisions. Style sheets are a way of displaying images, text, buttons, fonts, and the spacing of those elements on your site. Using a CMS with style sheets means you don’t have to individually format every page of your content! Instead, you can just use commands like “heading 1,” “paragraph font 2,” etc. If you make style changes in the future, you can make one update to the font size or color in your CSS, and it updates every instance of that style––over your whole website.
As the church communicator, you will probably be the one who writes or sets up your church’s style guide. You’ll decide that the title of a blog post will be Header 3, and buttons for events will be medium style, but buttons for social sharing will be small, etc. You’ll set the “visual tone” for your website. As an added bonus, this style guide can be used for all things visual: slides, bulletins, flyers, etc.
If you’re considering the details of a church website redesign, staging is an important thing to understand. You’ll be able to leave your old site live while you build this new one in the staging site––without people accidentally finding the unfinished product. This is a universal part of the process no matter what company or hosting you’re using. And just like in reality, the sandbox is a great place to play! You’ll be able to create, test, and view your layout just as they will look once you take your shiny, new site live.
Being responsive is generally the same concept as being “mobile-friendly.” Even search engines have started to recognize the importance of favoring websites that provide great experiences for mobile users! Your church’s website will probably have a high number of active users on a smaller devices, and it’s important that you serve them just as well as you help members on desktop computers.
Picture this: You have a new visitor who’s interested in coming to a church service. She finds you through a Google search on her laptop, and loves that your website shows how modern and forward-thinking your church looks! She decides to attend the Sunday service tomorrow––hooray! But on her way the next day, she forgets the address. She tries to find your website on her iPhone, but the navigation is a mess, and some of the buttons aren’t working. It takes too long for photos to load, and the scrolling function is out-of-whack. She can’t find the “New Here” section as easily as she could on her laptop, and it’s frustrating; so frustrating that she gives up and decides not to attend.
Having a responsive site seem so important now!
See this example of parallax scrolling to see if it fits the style and feel you want your church website to have. This type of web design technique is beautiful and modern. It has the feel of a complex layering, but with the visual pop of a background photo!
It’s easy to confuse a template like this with a “theme.” Your website’s theme is a predetermined style for the site overall. And that theme is made up of different templates (or types of pages). You can have a sermons page and an events page in your theme, but each of those are individual "templates." It’s a pretty common word, but when we say “template,” we mean the structure of certain pages and what type of content they’re built for.