The Parish of Porth Newydd
The History of The Parish of Cymmer and Porth Website (Later to become The Parish of Porth Newydd)
The
March 2005 issue of our Parish
Magazine came out and on the back page there was a vacancy for a webmaster
in amongst the contact list.
I immediately phoned Father Graham to offer my services to build a new
site. I hadn't long started worshiping at St
John and I didn't want to sound too pushy about offering my services
but it seemed like I had been guided to notice that the parish needed
a webmaster. Who reads a back page of a magazine contact list anyway!
The word "vacant" wasn't exactly in large letters with an advert
flashing lights at me!.
Firstly I looked around for inspiration and to see what other parishes
had done. I did not want a simple 5 page site that nobody was going to
look at. It had to be dynamic, interesting and a very enjoyable read.
A tall order for a church website but I was up for a challenge.
I have a background in building websites and work for a department in
the BBC Wales in Llandaff who build and maintain websites, so it was essentially
straight forward for me to start as I already had a basic understanding
of website construction. But as I started I appreciated that parish websites
had to be easily accessible from the young to the old so navigation was
my top concern to anybody who visited the site so they could find their
way around very easily.
I started with the usual pages, "About
us", "Contact us",
"Services" and it
didn't take long, perhaps a few hours to have the bare bones of a site.
I even visited the two churches of the parish alone to take some pictures
for the site. I created a template in Dreamweaver (there are other packages
around such as Microsoft Frontpage) so all pages looked the same and created
a Parish banner,
therefore every new page created had identical links on the left and so
made the user comfortable moving around the site. A good pointer is to
test navigation on a few family members and just watch them as they move
around correcting anything they find difficult to access. The Church
in Wales website offers some great instruction for building a site
from scratch and is well worth browsing through there to get some instruction
if you've never attempted building a website. ( http://www.churchinwales.org.uk/parishwebsite/index.html
)
A must for any site is a site
map and as long as you've got this you know full well that it will
be used and you're confident that all the content is easily accessible.
A search engine is another must
and I used a free search engine to integrate into the site. (e.g the one
I use is www.atomz.com)
As far as websites go do a bit of searching for free tools and content
as you don't want to pay for anything if you can help it. The only expense
has been buying the domain name www.parishofcymmerandporth.org
but it was only £10 for 2 years. I chose www.ukreg.com
to buy the domain name from and found their site extremely easy to use.
Of course the most important part of setting up a site is getting the
site hosted. There are lots of companies out there in the internet who
will do this. Try and find one who will host your site for free without
any adverts or banners. I find it really annoying when you've got a lovely
site and pop up banners and adverts spoil it. I suppose I was lucky and
a collegue helped me out in work and hosted it for me but there are some
good ones out there. (e.g. http://www.f2o.org/
is one I have found recently). Sometimes your ISP (who you access the
internet through) will give you some free space.
Once you have uploaded your site(usually where you host your site will
have instructions how to do this) make sure it works correctly and you
can easily jump around the site and any picture that you have added shows
up.
Of course it could take anything from a few days to get a couple of pages
completed or a few weeks or even months to create a more dynamic website
with lots of content. Once it is sort of ready for action as it were you
have to advertise it. Go to major search engine such as www.google.co.uk
and use their submit URL facility. It's no good creating a fantastic website
and nobody visits!. After submitting to quite a number of major search
engines I decided on a more practical way of advertising and made up some
simple handouts for the church table. This consisted of just the banner
image from the site printed out with the website address underneath and
left in a box on the church table. It's amazing how many are picked up
and taken home. I'm reliably informed that even Christine, Father Graham's
wife send them out in all her letters.
To make sure you know who's coming to your site use some sort of web tracker
that tells you how many people visit and where they come from and what
pages they have looked at. A bit like big brother I know but it'll help
you know which are the most popular pages and which search engines are
sending visitors your way. As an example I use www.statcounter.com
, again another free service which is very good.
Our Parish website visitors are slowly building and more and more regulars
are surfing it. It has been enjoyable experience building it and as some
of the features show you can
learn quite a considerable amount about the Parish. I've recently added
the text and pictures from our Centenary
booklet that was published in 1989. It's a great history of St
John and St Lukes church
and even though it took my wife Dawn quite a while to type it up we learnt
a great deal about our parish. It's also published online for the world
to now see instead of being forgotten on a bookshelf somewhere. You can
read the content here www.parishofcymmerandporth.org/centenary.htm
I hope this account will encourage many more Parishes to have an online presence, spreading the word and encouraging new life into the Church. Take a browse through our site http://www.parishofcymmerandporth.org and don't forget to sign our guestbook.
Luke Surrey (14/06/05)
Parish Webmaster
