By Chip Dizard

The other day I was watching the CNN ticker at the bottom of the screen and the sentence looked like this:

“Britney?s children get to see their mom.”

Did you ever see this? Does this ever happen to you? It happens to me when working on email newsletter campaigns in two ways: when I copy text off of the blog (HTML page) to paste into my Email Canvas in Adventist Church Connect or when I write the blog first in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste directly into the blog.

What’s happening is that Microsoft Word inserts strange characters that replace quotes, dashes and apostrophes like the one example above. Also, if you’re copying and pasting right from a web page you may be taking some HTML code you don’t necessarily see.

What can you do?

1. If You Use Word - Paste everything to Word first. Then copy what you’ve pasted. Go to the area you want to paste the copy into in your Email Canvas and highlight it. Then click on the “paste from Word” symbol in the toolbar that looks like this: and a screen with a large text field will appear. Paste your text into the screen and click Insert. You may have to choose a font and a size but you won’t get any weird characters or formatting.

2. If You Don’t Use Word - Instead of pasting the text into Word, paste your text into Notepad if you’re on a PC or in TextEdit if you’re on a Mac. Then copy and paste your copy into your web document.

You can also use a utility call Clipboard Fusion to automatically scrub your text as it is copied to the clipboard. You can find it here: http://www.binaryfortress.com/clipboardfusion/

By Chip Dizard

One purpose of a church website is to allow people to easily contact the church for more information, especially if they have had no previous contact.

We might prefer potential visitors to use the phone, but email allows people to contact you for information at any time. And as churches webmasters, we want to encourage connections every way we can.

However, there is a problem that can arise when you display your church’s email address on your church’s website. The problem is that spammers can then see it and add your church’s email address to their database. They can do this either manually or, more likely, in an automated fashion. When a church email account receives lots of spam, it becomes harder to deal with and busy staff can mean that false positives are not checked on a regular basis.

A List Apart, a website for people who create websites, has an article called “Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation,” which looks at the history of techniques to fox spammers and what can be done now. Click here to learn what steps you can take to stop spammers’ efforts.

The article particularly looks at the issue of user-friendliness, because adding ‘REMOVE-ME’ to an email address is at best inconvenient for a user. And as churches, we do want to encourage people to contact us as much as possible.

Chip Dizárd is the co-founder and creative director of Absolute Presence, a website development firm located in Baltimore, Maryland. Chip serves Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist Church as webmaster. He also serves as the lead video editor for the Encounter Television Broadcast featuring Pastor Fredrick Russell. He is a frequent contributor to the church technology community by speaking at seminars and training sessions. In his free time he enjoys golf, watching sports and spending time with his wife Ros and their 2-year-old daughter Sydney.

During the next 10 days people who don’t regularly attend church will be looking for a place to “do something religious.” If some one visited your church website would they be encouraged to celebrate Christmas with your church family?
Christmas and Easter are the two times each year when you have a special opportunity to reach out to your community and to people who don’t regularly attend. The home page of your church website should receive special attention at these times.
Don’t show a picture of your church building (put this on the contact us page). Instead show a picture of friendly faces of members, or a picture of last year’s Christmas concert, play or service.
Your website home page is the billboard for your church — what message are you sending?