Timothy's Thoughts

A fter putting it off for far too long, I went looking for a new dentist the other day. I started with the website of my insurance provider, which gave me the name of a dentist office near me. From there, I went to the website of the dentist office, which actually has several branches in the Metroplex and a couple in Austin. I hate calling to make an appointment because I’m always at work during the typical office hours and it is inconvenient. But this website was different. This website had a form for people to fill out if they wanted an appointment or more information. Since it was Sunday evening, I filled out the form, believing that they would contact me the next day. They did not. I waited another day and on Tuesday I filled out the form again. This time, I asked the question in the more information field, “Is anyone responding to this form?” Still no response. I ended up taking time out of my workday, just to call and schedule an appointment that could have been done using the fr...

Your platform is essentially the people who willingly listen to you. I’ve said before that platform is your capacity to influence people. We must earn the right to influence people. The reason you are able to influence people is because they have given you the right to influence them. Most people have sense enough not to give that right away too freely. We must earn the right to influence people. This is just as true with an online platform as it is with any other social platform. Subconsciously, every visitor has asked the question Why should I visit this site? It Answers a Question If a user finds a site through a search engine, he is probably looking for the answer to a very specific question. If the site appears in the search results and the title and summary statement imply that the site will answer the question, the user clicks the link. But a platform this does not make. Even if the user finds the exact answer he was looking for, there is no guarantee that he will ever return. ...

A fter several months of putting up with a website template that I wasn't particularly pleased with, but was "good enough," I updated my website . The content's all the same as before, but I got rid of the design that I had hoped would look like a piece of paper with a burned edge--like what we used to do when we were children--and I updated it to something that I think looks better. The CSS is a little more simple than before, giving us less opportunity for it to break. I’ve got the print capability working. So, if you happen to be on my website and find an article you want to print, all you have to do is hit the print button on the browser and you should get a nice black on white page without the graphics. Well, without the graphics other than the images on the right-hand side of the page. Anyway, if you’re bored, go check it out. Like I said, the content hasn’t changed, so you won’t find much there that you couldn’t have found before.

Yesterday I commented that Thomas Nelson wasn’t listening. The problem, as I saw it, was that though they had plenty of contact information listed on their website, they didn’t have anything that indicated that I could inform them of a problem I found on their site. Let’s not focus on Thomas Nelson. Let’s bring it back to the topic of Church Website Design . When users look at your website, do they receive enough feedback to tell them how to contact the appropriate person? Churches are often compartmentalized by various ministries. The different ministries may not be aware of what other ministries are doing. Even the pastor may be unaware of what some ministries are doing on a daily basis. Website visitors are often aware of this, so if they send a inquiry they want it to go to the right person the first time rather than having it passed from person to person or deleted. A good place to start is to include contact information for each of the individual ministry leaders. We could al...

Inside burning buildings, Captain Caleb Holt lives by the firefighter's adage: Never leave yoru partner. Yet at home, in the cooling embers of his marriage, he lives by his own rules. Growing up, his wife Catherine always dreamed of marrying ... [emphesis added] What’s wrong with the statement above? I copied this statement from Thomas Nelson’s website. Now my thought was that a publisher employees enough editors that they ought to be able to spell the word your correctly on their website, but people make mistakes. That isn’t the problem. I figured that since Thomas Nelson is trying to make a good impression about their products they would want to correct the obvious mistakes in the description. They wouldn’t want people thinking the book has the same mistakes in it. Since I noticed the mistake I thought I would contact the webmaster and tell this person about it. It would then be up to Thomas Nelson to decide if they really care enough to correct the description. I looked ...

One of the things I have been thinking about recently is how can a novelist use a website to sell books? It is very important that we draw a distinction between novels and non-fiction books. It may not be easy, but with non-fiction the formula is straight forward. The Non-fiction Method People choose which websites they visit based on a felt need. Often, the felt need is translated into a search engine query. Unless you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have found this post by typing how can a novelist use a website to sell books or something similar, into Google or some other search engine. You may have clicked on the link because it may answer your question. Following that thought. If a non-fiction author has written a book about Habakkuk, it is reasonable to assume that the people who will buy the book are looking for information about Habakkuk or other books about prophets. The author can provide this information on his website and then simply say, “if you would like to ...