Heal Your Church WebSite

I just overheard a useful conversation between two vending machine operators while loading up our office junk food dispenser with a bunch of products that didn’t sell last week. It is if nothing else, an object lesson in contrast to my oft quoted aphorism “solve their problems, don’t tell them yours.” Here are 5 things we can in turn do in contrast to improve the user experience on our church and/or charity websites …

… but first a bit of context.

Last week I was working late, so I went to the vending machine to purchase some sugar-free Dentyne chewing gum. The machine was out - so were most the low-cal, low-carb consumables. The next day I noted the machine restocked, only the empty slots instead of offering snack solutions for my health conscious office mates, instead the replenished racks included:

Today, while capping off my coffee cup by the adjacent caffeine delivery device, I noted two gentlemen again restocking the junk food dispenser when one of the machine operators - possibly in training - asked the other “how do you decide what to refill it with?” the other immediately replying “... with whatever I have too much of, that’s how I decide.”

No, no, no, no, NO!

Now granted, both these individuals are likely a bit more than minimum wage employees to a large, regional vending concern, so I don’t expect them to understand what’s wrong with said answer. However, the proprietor for whom they work should - and should train and equip these hard workers with information to become smart workers - that is provide them with data sheets on what’s hot and what’s not for a given office vending machine.

Same rules apply for our church and charity websites. Here are 5 quick ones off the top of my head:

1. Collect useful usage data - does your site have a mechanism for collecting useful usage data? Note, I said useful usage data. There are some counters and stats services that provide little more than a “hit count,” which in today’s age of search engines, aggregators, and spammers can give lead you down a path to decision perdition by including counts of visits by automated systems not interested in filling your pews.If you don’t know where to start, may I suggest incorporating Google’s Analytics on your website. Though not real-time, at the end of the day, it does provide you with a great idea on both what humans and bots are banging away at your site.
2. Understand where the traffic is coming from - that is understand:
   • What search engines are sending the most traffic?
   • What keywords are being used with said search engines?
   • What keywords are being used on your own website’s search tool?
   • What other websites are sending you traffic?
   • How much direct traffic is there?
   • How much traffic is being driven from email applications?
   • How much traffic is being driven from aggregators?
3. Understand what pages are hot - and also understand why pages are not. This should be pretty straight forward, but along with asking which page gets the most visits, also ask:
   • Entry pages - which page is the first e viewed by a visitor and/or which are the pages most attracting visitors?
   • Exit pages - from which page do visitors leave the most
   • Average visit duration – what is the total length of a user’s visit?
   • Average page duration – how long are pages is viewed?
   • Top path – what is the leading sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit?
   • Bounce rate - are there pages which users leave without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs?
   • Error messages - where is the user experiencing some level of frustration due to errors? Information which could explain your high exit/bounce rates.
4. Understand why pages are hot - In other words, regardless of which analytics tool you use, most can only point out WHAT pages are popular. That’s only half the picture. What you need to do is figure our WHY said pages are hot.Two examples: are two blogs I run, each of which have pages that appear to be popular due to their relevance to recent events:
   • HealYourChurchWebite’s most popular article is “How I fixed my Windows XP Stop c000021a {Fatal System Error} with Knoppix Linux” with the largest amount of traffic being driven in from Google searches on the keyword/phrase “Stop c000021a” … probably in response to she several crashes caused by a recent Windows XP SP 3 release that some speculate is responsible for said error.
   • BlogJordan.com ’s most popular article is “The Petra Treasury Indiana Jones didn’t show you” - usually by means of Google and YouTube searches on the keyword/phrase “Petra Indiana Jones” and/or “Indiana Jones Petra” .. probably in response to recent showings of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” on cable in response and anticipation for the release of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.“
5. Establish and track conversion goals - I’m not talking about instances of baptisms or individuals asking Christ into their lives - though that is the ultimate goal here - rather I’m talking in this case of establishing goals and objectives for the website such as getting visitors to:
   • subscribe to the RSS feed for your sermon titles/series;
   • import your events calendar into your;
   • link your site on theirs;
   • fill out a “send me more information” form;
   • print your page that displays both directions and times of services; and/or
   • visit again, and again … and again.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how cool, how Flashy, how seeker-centric, how Y-generation, how usable, nor how XHTML compliant your pages are … if you don’t collect useful metrics on your church and/or charity online presence you’re as good as flying blind …

… which is okay until you crash into the mountain side of “no website visitors because you’re wasting gifts and talents on the wrong things …” or perhaps none at all as described in Matthew 25:

“… he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ …

… ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant!”

Don’t be like sloth-boy, add and analyze your web usage now - unless of course you want your web vending machine full of stuff nobody is buying.

Yes, I know, all cool programmers use Python these days - but to this old-school programmer, PERL is to my antiquated PC what GWBasic was to first computer at work back in 1983. That is a nice little tool to get things done, like identify a list of IP addresses by country.

Here’s the situation, I’ve been getting a lot of incoming spambots attempting to create accounts and post comments both here on HYCW and a few other sites I help manage. The Akismet spam filtering service catches all of it - but there’s still at times a huge draw on bandwidth, CPU and other resources when these bots hit.

So from time to time, I harvest the IP addresses from the thwarted ne’er-do-well’s failed attempts via my user registration table and/or Apache logs and then add them to the firewalls, .htaccess file and/or application IP ban lists of these various sites - except for those IPs incoming from countries where both the languages and laws give me the ability to email the abuse administrator.

Moreover, by excluding IPs from countries like the US, Canada, etc … from my ‘hit list,’ I don’t accidentally banish entire ISPs such as RoadRunner, ComCast or AOL when one of their user’s machines goes z0mbie goes due to some malware.

So the trick is then to take all the IPs from all the computers with which I’m associated, and drive the list through a simple application that will generate a list of IPs to ban - while excluding IPs whom I can (and do) contact via email at a later time.

Which is what inspired me to write ip2Country.pl - a fast little PERL script to bulk identify IPs by countries who don’t have IP abuse administrators who care, and generate a bash script to insert the entries into my apf firewall deny_hosts.rules file:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# by Dean Peters
# http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/
#
use IP::Country::Fast;
use Geography::Countries;
my $reg = IP::Country::Fast->new();

print "#/bin/sh\n";
print "# -- append firewall --\n";
while() {
        chomp;
        my $ip = $_;
        my $ip_cntry_abr = $reg->inet_atocc($ip);
        my $ip_cntry_nam = country $ip_cntry_abr;
        next if ($ip_cntry_abr =~ m/US|CA|GB|AU|NZ/i);
        print “/etc/apf/apf -d $ip {mad spammer from $ip_cntry_nam}\n”;
}
print “# — restart firewall –\n”;
print “/etc/apf/apf -r\n”;

__DATA__
121.1.29.246
121.15.200.148
193.238.213.70
196.20.7.74
210.22.83.146
217.30.244.226
222.124.200.212

Oh sure, I could be real fancy and write a version that takes command line arguments for individual IP addresses and/or a file of IP addresses … but the point here was to demonstrate how a crufty old tool like PERL can help bulk identify IPs by countries so you can too add them to your firewalls, .htaccess file and/or application IP ban list.

That said, if you’ve got a Python or even PHP version of the same, leave a comment and share the goods.

Or you can just preemptively use the online services of Block a Country and be done with it.

As a card-carrying member of the vast math conspiracy, and in light of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.’s statement made in Beaverton Oregon last week that has been all but ignored by old media - I have decided to fight off the fatigue of almost turning 50 next weekend by providing the blogosphere the tools required to accurately quote, report and interpret quotes such as the one made below:

It is wonderful to be back in Oregon. Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it.”

So it is with great programmatic pleasure that I present the WordPress Plugin : Obammath, which once installed will:

• convert all instances of the number 50 prefixed with the small letter ‘o’ to ‘58′;
• convert all instances of the word ‘fifty’ prefixed with the small letter ‘o’ to ‘fiftyeight’;
• grammatically correct any pluralized reference to the ’state of Alaska and Hawaii’.

Not only will such a plugin help the new media continue to report stories squelched by the old media, but can and should help a tuckered-out Obama execute along the following objectives:

• correctly identify the number of stars on the new line of Obama-swag such as on his new patriotic lapel pin;
• introduce super-stealthy hidden taxes where all tax rates are increased by an additional 16%;
• immediately increase the Federal minimum wage by $1.14 to $8.29;
• empower the native-born Honoluluan with yet another special interest group by combining the Hawaiian and Alaskan cultures into a new protected demographic known as ‘Hawaskans’;
• clear the way for the statehood of the District of Columbia, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico with plenty of headroom left for Mexico, Jamaica, Cuba, French Ontario, the 13th District of Chicago; and
• head-off any hinky Hillary Al-Gore-ithms introduced by Michigan and Florida delegates.

Here is a link to download the plug-in, which with some luck, will require augmentation and expansion as the Jr. Senator from Illinois continues to make ‘macaca moments’ available to the general public as demonstrated in the YouTube video below:

In the meantime, I am going to seek Federal grant in case this application requires four years of ongoing maintenance.

Those putting off the purchasing and/or long-term renewal of a domain name for their church and/or charity because the price was too high may want to re-think that strategy as it appears that the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for ‘.org’ domain names, will be raising their annual wholesale price for ‘.org’ domains by 10%.

There’s no getting around it, despite the efforts of many to teach, rebuke, correct & train in righteous web design, there still exists a great cloud of witlessness when it comes to the Church’s presence online. A fact painfully corroborated by the persistent body of ‘kitsch‘ out there that distracts, annoys and otherwise drives-away people seeking and/or serving the Lord.

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