By design, blogs seek to foster conversation. You post, ask for comments, and look to engage in discussion. The lifetime of a post can exist long after you press “Publish.”

But a single post isn’t the only thing you want your readers to pursue. You want them to come back, engage with others, explore other posts, and so on. You don’t want drive-by readers but you can’t expect them to do all the work themselves.  As such, you want to make sure their experience on your site fosters conversation, high usability, and prompts them to continue exploring your content.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Check out these three plug-ins that enhance the user experience and that require absolutely no coding in order to get them up and running. Continue reading »

One of the challenges that web developers face is providing a consistent experience across not only a variety of web browsers but operating systems, as well. This experience not only translates to the layout of a website, but the typography, too.

There are some fonts that are shared between operating systems (such as Arial, Times New Roman, and others), but there are other web-friendly fonts that aren’t shared among platforms. On top of that, alternative operating systems such as Linux, do not share common fonts but are becoming relatively common means of accessing sites and services on the web.

So how are we supposed to provide a common experience that translates well across all platforms? Enter typeface.js. It’s a free JavaScript utility that utilizes built-in browser technology that allows you to provide the same typography across all platforms.

Ready for a little lesson in code? More after the jump.

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Guest Post by Tom McFarlin.

We’ve mentioned Posterous a few times here on ChurchCrunch. For those of you that are, ahem, missing out, Posterous makes it dead simple to share anything and everything you want with all of your social networking services by email.

Even if you don’t use Posterous, you’ve likely seen some of your friends sharing links that begin with http://post.ly. Initially, this was the domain that Posterous used to link your content with other networks so that the URL’s weren’t long and ugly; however, on Tuesday, Posterous unveiled a new service and went public with their post.ly domain:

Posterous differentiates itself from most of the other online blogging platforms by allowing you to simply share all your goodness via email and by dispersing it out to your social services.

Post.ly doesn’t seek to change that. It doesn’t even attempt to add to the formula. It simply provides another way of doing the same thing, it just looks different doing it. Rather than using your email client, you can now use your web browser.

Yet, I’ve got mixed feelings about this… Continue reading »

This is a guest post by Tom McFarlin.

Blogging platforms and content management systems are great, but they aren’t going to meet everyone’s needs. Some people will find them overkill and would rather roll their own system.

If you’re going to go that route, you’ve obviously got a sharp set of technical chops. One of the most common challenges is making sure that your site looks good on as many monitors as possible. What may look good on a 1280×800 laptop is not going to give the same experience to someone running a 1680×1050 resolution.

And you can’t forget your grandmother – she loves seeing the stuff you’ve done even if it is on a 1024×768 screen.

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to this stuff but there are tools that you can use to make your job easier. Ultimately, it’s up to you but one great framework that makes page development incredibly easy and very flexible across all sorts of resolutions is Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System (or 960gs).

What’s that? Read more after the jump…

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This is a guest post by Tom McFarlin.

One of the nice things about the modern web is that after you’ve secured your domain and your host, it’s relatively easy to get started publishing some content online.

Well. Sort of.

For some people, it’s a matter of building the website and launching it into cyberspace. For others, it’s just another place where more decisions have to be made. But we don’t have that kind of time. We need some software that will do the heavy lifting for us. Luckily, there are a lot of free tools out there that can help ease our pain.

We’ll take a look at a few of them after the jump. Continue reading »

This is a guest post by Tom McFarlin.

Coming up with a unique, creative, memorable domain name is tough. Luckily, checking its availability is not.

Of course, registering a domain name is only half the battle.

Once you’ve got that squared away, you have to find a place to actually store your stuff. You need a web host. And selecting one can be a challenge. There are a lot of terms associated with hosting – bandwidth, databases, sub-domains, file-transfer prototcol, analytics, logging – and you’re trying to make sense of this stuff so you can spend your money wisely.

No worries.

It’s completely possible to get an affordable web host without breaking the bank that is your offering plate and without getting bogged down in all the terminology.

All you really need to know is what makes up a cost-effective hosting platform and what to look for in a good host.

Ready to get started? Learn more after the jump…

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This is a guest post by Tom McFarlin

When it comes to maintaining an online presence, the modern church is not exactly flourishing. To make matters even more challenging, the church is still about four years behind everyone else with respect to technology.

Finding – and affording – good designers and  good developers is hard so it’s typically up to volunteers to step up to help contribute to the cause.

But there’s a problem: The Internet is a big place. A really big place.

When you sit down to begin building a site, there’s a lot of stuff out there you must sift through – various services, applications, technologies, and so on. Unless you’ve got a background in web development, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all of this information let alone trying to even find a starting point.

Processing all of this stuff is like drinking from a fire hose. But I’d like to try to slow the flow a little bit.

Each week, I’m going to toss out a couple tools, utilities, applications, and/or best practices that are geared towards those of you that are looking to bring your church online but lack the time to invest in all the research.

Ready? Let’s go.

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This is a Guest Post by Tom McFarlin.

Between all the technology and online services that we’ve created each of which demands our attention on some level, sometimes I wonder what we’ve really done to ourselves. There is a constant temptation to feel like we need to stay udpated with all this stuff online.

It’s amazing we get anything done.

Yeah, I know. There’s already a lot of critics out there about this kind of stuff. I’m not one of them. Sure, I think you can go overboard with certain things but that is something that’s held true long before the Internet. Instead, I’ve attempted to actually to leverage all of this stuff to help keep myself honest in pursuing my faith rather than distracting me from it.

Here are three ADD-inducing technologies and one ancient strategy that I leverage to help me keep the faith:

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