Websters

UU Websters

The Websters mailing list is designed to allow webmasters to ask and answer questions about building and maintaining websites for their congregation and/or district.

UUA Resources

• Where can I join the Websters mailing list?
• Which are the largest congregations in the UUA?

Other UU-related Resources

• What other useful web sites or pages have information that might be useful in designing, building, and maintaining a UU-related web site?

Policy Issues

• What online privacy issues should I pay attention to?

Design Issues

• What basic information resource is available specifically for UU sites? (Word doc)
• Where can I find good examples of UU church web sites?
• How can I avoid common mistakes
• What should be included as part of my Web Style Guide
• How can I make my site accessible to users with disabilities?
  • Best practice: Use the W3 HTML Validator for conformance to W3 standards.
    • Alternate validators include CSE HTML Validator and NetMechanic
  • Best practice: Use Tools to test Accessibility.
  • Give users the power to adjust the font size on your site.
• Suggestions for Menu-Navigation bars
• Icon Support to support icons specific to your site in different browsers.
• Web Site Usability A list of questions. How user-friendly is your web site?
  • Google Traps: What they are, how to avoid them.
  • To Blue or Not to Blue: Pros and Cons of having all text links blue and underlined.

Content Management

• What Content Management System (CMS) can help manage a web site?
• Graphics-related questions
  • How can I add a UUA online banner to my website?
  • How can I add a Beacon Press banner to my website?
  • Where can I get chalice images for our site?
• What Calendar Software can help manage events information?
• What are my options for Putting sermons online?
• What Image Editing Software can I use to prepare images for the site?

Newsletters

• Online newsletters

Site Management

• How can I add a Search feature to our site?
• How can I track website visitors?
• What are effective anti-spam strategies?
• Identify possible DNS problems by running the diagnostic tool at http://www.dnsreport.com

Search Engine Optimization

• Since Google will be one of your major sources of traffic, you'll want to ensure that your site is listed in Google and follows the Google webmaster guidelines.

• Link placement is important to help getting your sites hits. See: Link Placement Suggestions

Site Syndication

• What is site syndication? What's the difference between RSS/ATOM/XML/RDF?
  • See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)
• Why would I want to syndicate my site?
  • One classic example would be to provide a "feed" of information on your Sunday services. That way, as soon as you put new information up on your web site, anyone who watched the feed would get the up-to-date information.
• Which UU churches or people have syndicated site feeds?
  • See Guide to UU blogs from Philocrites
• Check out news aggregators for the software people use to read syndication feeds.
• How can we view all these current UU headlines if all we have is a browser?
  • See http://uupdates.net/sites.php

Parking Lot Questions

aka wiki-pages waiting for someone to create.

• What web security issues should I pay attention to?
• How do I allow private and secure connections to my web site (SSL/TLS) and make my own certificate?
• How do I create an intranet and/or "private area" which restricts access to just our members?
• What are effective stewardship practices for our website?
• What are the pros/cons of joining affiliate programs like Amazon.com?
• Copyright Policy : Who owns the sermons : the minister or the congregation?
• My Finance Committee wants to use PayPal : what should I tell them?
  • See the discussion in UU-Money.
• How can I get listservs (as in multiple) up and running ? What are my options??