I’ve thought about this for a while now. Why do we print bulletins each week with virtually the same information that is on our web site? Isn’t there another route we can take? Today, I saw Tim’s post today and it got those creative juices flowing again.
About 3 years ago, I attended one of Granger’s Saturday night services. I still remember Tony saying that we could use their free WiFi and connect to a special site to get the bulletin there. I downloaded and saved the file which you can view here and here. I loved this idea and always kept it in my head that this was certainly a new idea for churches to use. As far as I knew, no one had ever done it like that before.
About a year ago, my family visited Pete’s church (Crosspoint) and noticed that their bulletin had general information about the church. Inside the bulletin was an insert with message notes and simple announcements on it. After the service, you were encouraged to drop off your used bulletin that would be recycled. Keep the notes, reuse the bulletin. Innovation at its best.
So why do churches still print bulletins? Answer, because it’s always been done that way. In this techie world we now live in, I’m thinking it’s time for some changes. Why not link up with facebook for your announcements or scheduled events? Or possibly have an rss feed (Google calendar) with your upcoming events scheduled. I know LifeChurch.tv already uses this on their site. Another thing is to have signups using your online church database like CCB or Fellowship One. How could we make message notes available with fill in blanks? Not sure about that one, but somebody will think of a way.
How can you incorporate all of these things into weekly bulletin and do it with excellence? Right now, I’m just beginning to think about this process. It sure opens up the door for some major opportunities.
For weeks, our church has been posting message outlines on our site to go along with the message. While this is helpful to the visitors to our site, it is a difficult process to convert from word to html. A copy & paste will simply not do the job. Word documents have too much junk attached inside them.
Using this site’s formula, we’re now able to convert any .doc better. Here’s the steps we’re using now(all from the link):
One way to convert a final version of a Word document to HTML is to send it to a Gmail account as an attachment. With this method, you can maintain your file format as .doc. (I’ve not tried this tip with Word 2007 .docx file format.)
To have Gmail convert a Word doc to HTML,
1. Open your favorite email program
2. Attach your Word document (the .doc file format) to the email.
3. Send the email to your Gmail account.
4. Open the Gmail item with the attachment.
5. Click the link at the bottom that says “View as HTML”. The document will open in your browser.
6. Right-click in your web browser and select “View Page Source” or “View Source”
7. Copy and paste the contents into a HTML editor or Notepad. Don’t paste it back into Microsoft Word.
8. Scroll toward the top of your file and look for the code Google adds to download your file. You should remove this link.
<div style=”background:#ffffcc;padding:4 8;border-bottom:thin solid #eeeeee;font-family:Arial,sans-serif”><a href=”/mail/?attid=0.1&disp=attd&view=att&th=1192fa6dbxxxxxxx”>Download the original attachment</a></div></div><div style=”margin:1ex”>
9. Make any changes in your editor.
10. Save your file with the .htm or .html extension.
I made a decision to switch my blog from a windows server to linux. I wanted to change wordpress’ links to show the title of the post instead of something like this jonathanhopson.com/p=1. The switch changed a few more functions that I need to tweak to start working again. But for the most part, it works like a charm.
With this process, I haven’t been able to update you on our anniversary trip. I’ll get to that tonight.
Yesterday, I received a phone call from Randy Sparks, Pastor of Real Life Church in Knoxville. He wanted to know about our site (Elevation Church’s). I shared that I built the site by looking at several churches’ sites and gathering some php information from one of our church members, Brad Johnson. He wants me to build a site for their church too.
Starting on Monday, I’ll be head deep in php, css, html, xml, and everything else for a couple of days. Do you know anyone who needs a website built?
