Gadgetopia

How DO You Serve Two Masters?: Dean Peters over at Heal Your Church Web Site is on vacation. so he asked a bunch of us to guest-write for this week. My day was today. I hope I didn’t suck.

[…] church Web sites have an interesting challenge in front of them: they have to search two audiences equally well.

First, we have the Visitors. […] These folks are perhaps looking for a church home, and have come to your site as part of their search.

On the other side, we have the Members. These are people who already belong to the church and are active in various activities and groups.

It’s actually very interesting working with someone else’s MT installation. For instance, since I couldn’t see the templates, I didn’t know what field Dean was using for the front page — Entry Body or Extended Entry. So I guessed…and got it wrong. Additionally, I didn’t know that he links Bible references automatically (awesomely done, incidentally — gotta be a heck of a regex…), so I had to pull an HREF that I originally had in there.

It’s tougher that you think to come up-to-speed on someone else’s site, given all the different configuration options, template tags, and plugin quirks Movable Type makes possible.