KevinPierpont.com

Great news for those of us who often need to move a Microsoft Word document to the web and wish to retain much of the formatting–and great news for those who wish to move Word documents to a WordPress powered website.

blog.dot is a Word document template with an associated DLL for Windows that makes moving a Word document to WordPress (or any other web application where HTML formatted text is needed) a breeze.

This tool produces very clean HTML–far better than Microsoft’s options for exporting HTML from a Word document. It can post directly to your blog or will give you a window of your HTML formatted text to copy and paste to WordPress or any other web application.

From: wpplugins.org

Today’s New Thinking Newsletter from Gerry McGovern gives insight on Measuring your web content management processes. He asks and helps answer some questions I think are helpful to ask of your church website.

• Is the right content being published for the right reader?
• How quickly is content getting published on the website?
• How well is content being edited?
• Is the publishing schedule being adhered to?
• Is out-of-date content being removed quickly?
• How are authors and editors managed?
• Is the metadata of a sufficient quality?
• How is reader feedback managed?

Read this interesting article at rationalchristianity.net to learn several easy ways to keep nonbelievers from visiting your Christian web site. The author took an informal survey of nonbelievers asking them to rate the annoyance level of some of the following on Christian run web sites.

Christian-themed backgrounds (crosses, fish, etc.)
Commercialism – prominent ads for online store, “buy my book,” “make a donation”
“Vote for this site” buttons
Using “webservant” in place of webmaster
Infighting – “Why Catholics/Protestants/etc. are wrong”
Prominent Bible verses (e.g. a theme verse at the top of the home page)
Written prayer (“Lord, please use this site…” or “I pray that this site will help you…”)

A few comments at the end of the article are also enlightening.

UPDATE: The article points out that these are things you should AVOID if you intend to appeal to a broader audience.

10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site at the Web Credibility site is a helpful list for creators of web sites. Anyone building a web site should review these guidelines and refer to them every few months. I can see I now have some work to do on our church site and my own.

Have you ever received an unsolicited e-mail invitation to earn thousands of dollars a month in only an hour or two a week? If you are like many, not only do you get those, but you get e-mail of a nature worse than that also. Did you know that a prime location for those who send you unsolicited e-mail to get your e-mail address is from your web site? Maybe you have a personal site or you are a Pastor and your e-mail address is on your church web site.
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Have you ever wanted to send a nice looking ezine to your church members or others on your e-mail list. Maybe you’ve thought about sending a monthly or weekly e-mail with a devotional thought and announcements of your churches activities. If you’ve tried this you’ve discovered how challenging it can be to make your message look better than just a regular e-mail message? Well, here’s a handy tool. Judy’s EZ Ezine Template is a tool that will help you with the layout of your ezine and keep it orderly. This handy web-based tool will give your ezine a little polish. Give it a whirl and if you have any suggestions leave a comment. I just might share your suggestion here in the near future.