Timothy's Thoughts

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 ...

Should Christians support prayer in public schools? That may seem like a silly question for a Christian to ask. When talking about the state of our society, many Christians point to the public schools and court rulings concerning prayer. Many go on to imply that any Christian that does not see the removal of prayer from schools as an evil thing must be submitting to the world’s influence, rather than that of the Holy Spirit. Why There Was Prayer in the Past When we consider the history of the public school system in America, it is easy to see why public schools had prayer. Prior to the 1840, the schools were primarily church run entities. As is the case with such organizations today, these church run schools were designed to teach doctrine rather than just reading and writing. When public schools were started, it made sense for the teachers to continue teaching the way they had in the past. If they opened with prayer in the morning, it made sense to continue that. If they used the Bi...

Because I have a website, I am able to block many SPAM messages at the server rather than letting them get in my inbox, but even this is a frustration for me because the spammers keep changing e-mail addresses and lately it seems like more than usual are getting through. Many suggest that I need drugs to give me a "hard rod." First off, I'm single and I don't need such a thing. Second, even if I did, I wouldn't be buying something like that from someone who sends out such vulgar e-mail messages. There is no doubt about it, these people are evil and I feel safe in saying that most of the people who send out spam are going to hell. So, we can't convince them to stop sending these messages out of the goodness of there hearts. What we can do is convince them to reduce what they send throught their pocket books. The problem with e-mail is that it is free. Suppose we created a system in which it cost 42 cents to send an e-mail message. Don't you think spammers w...

Someone at Thomas Nelson Publishers is going to read this blog post and I’m not even going to tell them about it. Granted, that is something of a bold statement when you consider how obscure this blog is, but it is true. The Internet has evolved to the point that we can target specific groups of people with accuracy and we can do it without inundating people’s inboxes with SPAM. Obviously, this could have huge marketing potential if we could use it to get our ideas and our products before potential customers while allowing them to think they chose to view the information. How it Works A few days ago, Michael Hyatt posted the article Defending Your Brand Online . In that article, he mentioned things that are necessary to head off damaging comments that appear on the Web. One of the things he suggests is to monitor the conversation . Conventional wisdom tells us to load our websites with keywords related to our products and hope that people are looking for what we are selling. That d...

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 ...

The Olympics are over. As we look back at it, what is it about the Olympics that made it so special? Is it because it brings the world together for two weeks of peace? No, there was no peace. Even at the Olympic games President Bush was talking to the Russians about a war with Georgia. A Cuban athlete and his coach were barred from a sport for life because the athlete kicked an official in the face. There were questions about judging practices and questions remain over whether the host country, China, cheated to obtain some of their many medals. Peace? There was no peace. Was it special because of how much China put into it? Maybe if you went, but for those of us at home it wasn’t so impressive. Sure, they threw many resources and many people at it, but what good is numbers when it lacks beauty? The 2008 Olympics were held in some of the ugliest buildings in the world. No, it wasn’t the resources they threw at it. The thing that makes the Olympics special is the celebration of our simi...