How to create a way for Church Staff to update the church's main page ---without teaching them html (a resource article from Neil MacQueen, www.sundaysoftware.com) At a church where I used to volunteer, we used create a main page with some code to allow staff to update an area of the main page using a form. All they had to do was fill in the form we had posted at the website for them, and then click "submit."  I am no longer at that church, and the person who took over the site have whacked the code and put up an unfortunate site -which is another story :-(     But, the code is still available and makes it easy for non-techies to update your church page without you the webtechie having to make the changes and upload the page for them. This article describes how this bit of code works. It also explains other features we had implemented on that former site. What they've done to the site since I've left... shall remain unmentioned. If you'd like to learn more about Church Website Design, read a free article on the subject at http://www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm   The Problem... Keeping website content fresh is important, but challenging. Church members don't visit stale content. Visitors exploring your website to learn more about you don't want to go to a church that has stale content. Staff and volunteers rarely have the technical training to keep site content fresh. And in far too many cases, the person who first created the site, regardless of their best intentions, doesn't keep it 'fresh enough.' At Hilliard Presbyterian (a small church by the way), we wanted a website that had a fresh front page with timely information which the pastor or staff could keep up to date without needing to be trained in website creation. So, we created a main page with an updatable mid-section. It DOES take some setup and know-how, but once that's done, it's done. Keeping It Fresh... Originally, we created a webpage form which took text that had been typed into it and sent it to a database on the server where the webpage was. Then we put in some code in the middle section of the main page to "call" that database text into that section. But that only gave us plain text. Then we came across a free piece of software called HTMLAREA. It's a hunk of javascript code that you copy to your server. That code generates a webform you can access on your site. Into that webform you type type and format content. Then you simply click "update" and that info gets posted to the page where you want it to appear. HTMLAREA was open source and have evolved into a better, more stable version called XINHA.  It was still free as of the date of this posting. Go to http://xinha.python-hosting.com/  for more information. Xinha (pronounced "xena" and based on the now defunct "htmlarea") webforms at your site look like those below. The OTHER advantage of creating Xinha webforms is your non-technical 'content contributors' can format their text with fonts/sizes/color and even add links to their postings. It works just like your wordprocessor. Now the volunteer or pastor can type what they want, bold it, colorize it, adjust the font just like their wordprocessor works. Setting up HTMLarea code on your site does take some know-how, but once it's set up, it's a slam dunk from there on out. Here's what the webpage looks like which our pastor or volunteers fill in: The webform pages at our site are password protected. But the pastor can give the password to anyone for them to keep the page up to date from any computer anywhere, anytime. I don't want to make this sound TOO easy. XINHA needs to be 'installed' by a competent web-person. But once it's up, it's up. And you can make update forms for any or all our your webpages. Verse of the Day We also have a "Verse of the Day" feature on our website which is updated by our pastor. The verses key into the time of year or upcoming/recent sermon passages. It's another webform he uses from home or church office. The submit button sends the text to a database file on the site. The main page of the website has a line of code which pulls up randomly from that database of verses. You can't copy our code because part of it resides on our server's mysql database. But there are other Verses javascripts on the web for free. You'll also notice our MAIN PAGE also has "Home Page -like" features: weather, search engine, and verse a day. One of our goals is to get our page to be the first page our members see when they turn on their browsers. To that effect, we've even created the "YES make me your homepage" button. Weather and Google Search Engine These are free elements. Just go to their respective websites and find their "how to put weather on your website" or "how to put Google on your website" links. They will even create the code for you which you can cut and paste into your webpage.   If you'd like to learn more about Church Website Design, read a free article on the subject at http://www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm In that article we challenge a few assumptions and describe a church website that's more than last year's good idea. View our list of Christian software games and Bible story software for children www.sundaysoftware.com/software.htm