MEDIA SALT

Friday Four: Website Analytics

By Brad Huss Friday September 3, 2010

4 Comments

Most web hosts including my side-project, BigHypeMedia.com, provide traffic history for websites through programs such as Webalizer or AWStats. However, these options are not my preferred choice when it comes to really analyzing website data.

It’s hard for my clients to understand the data they are looking at via Webalizer or AWStats. Most have no idea how to access the data even though I provide instructions. To be all honest, I usually do not tell them that data is being collected for their domain.

Are there any reliable options out there that are far superior to what your web host provider offers?

Absolutely!

Here are four options that I have personally tried and tested in the past and quite possibly use present day.

Church Videos = The Never Ending Story

By Guest Blogger Thursday September 2, 2010

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Why are church videos so long?

Every single time I watch a video from a church online I usually only make it about a quarter of the way through. Usually that means I have watched over 2 minutes of video.

Church videos are way too long. Go watch some church’s parody of a 30 second commercial. Inevitably it will be 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Don’t get me wrong; I’m as much to blame. When I go back and watch some videos I made a year ago I can’t make it through. They are so long.

Good Intentions

By David Tonen Wednesday September 1, 2010

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Personal Intentions

We all know the famous phrase, so I won’t bother reciting it here, but we all can relate to having good intentions and then never delivering, right?

I have good intentions to work out 3 days a week…
I have good intentions to eat healthier than I do now…
I have good intentions to have 1-hour of prayer and Bible reading time each day…

And so it goes. How about you? We all have some area(s) in our lives that we intend on changing, upgrading, or implementing but without a determined strategy, schedule, and accountability.

These things simply just don’t happen.

No room for ’sacred cows’ in a crop rotation!

By Cleve Persinger Thursday August 26, 2010

2 Comments

No room for ’sacred cows’ in a crop rotation!

Everything has a season.

Remember when the top evangelism strategy at your church was going door-to-door and sharing the Gospel?

Remember when you were the contemporary church in town because you used an overhead projector to display your worship lyrics?

Remember when beveled fonts mixed with a little drop shadow used to be on the cutting edge of design?

Retweets vs. Email Forwards

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Many people believe the power of Twitter lies in its users’ ability to share information in real-time.
I disagree.
I believe that Twitter’s power lies in its users’ ability to promote other users’ information, in real-time, through retweets.
For example, one user with 1,000 followers tweets about a movie which is in turn retweeted by thousands of their [...]

One Embed to Rule Them All

12 Comments

I think I’ve been pretty transparent about my love of Vimeo in the past; frankly put, I think they’re the best video site on the web… and I don’t award that title flippantly. You’d be hard pressed to find a site that could provide your ministry with better video quality and features for Vimeo’s ridiculously [...]

Friday Four: @Twitter Ranking Tools

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This past week you probably noticed several people tweeting:
“My Twifficiency score is __%. What’s yours? http://twifficiency.com”
Twifficiency scores seem to lack credibility. In fact, many well known Twitter profiles such as Marissa Mayer’s, a Google Executive, scored a 0% Twifficiency. Some news outlets have even accused 17-year-old James Cunningham of being a scam artist. The site [...]

God Squad vs Trademark Law

4 Comments

Churches are notorious for ripping off well-known logos in the name of Jesus, but trademarks are not to be ignored.
Trademarks will win every time.
Case in point, an article I read in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this week. Father Luke Strand, a priest in Wisconsin hoping to create humor and a “conversation starter,” designed a logo [...]

Who Are The People In Your Neighbourhood?

2 Comments

If I were to ask you:
Who is your church targeting?
What would you say? When I ask most church leaders this question, I almost always get the answer, “everyone,” or I get a blank stare. For some strange reason, churches think that they are there to serve everyone - and they are right - they are! [...]

Twitter: Rules to Live By

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Jon Acuff (the reliably funny mastermind behind StuffChristiansLike.net) has a terrific post up today that’s full of top-notch Twitter wisdom. Here are two of my favorite points:
12. Don’t tweet holier than you normally talk. Don’t get seminary mouth all of the sudden when you get on Twitter.
31. Unfortunately, 140 characters will not allow you to [...]

Friday Four: More HTML5 Resources

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I’m not sure about you, but there’s still a lot about HTML5 that is still magic to me.
Here are four resources that will help ease you into it as we march down this road together.

3 Mobile Web Strategies

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Read an interesting article this morning over on Opera’s dev site that lists three mobile web optimization strategies.
It got me thinking about the mobile strategy for the sites I manage, and if I should change.
Is your church or ministry site mobile-friendly?
Check these out. I float between #1 and #2. What about you?