I read this article today, and it was an adequate reminder to make sure my home WiFi was secured. An estimated 32% of Americans steal WiFi access from their neighbors. You might not think it’s a big deal to have an open network, but it is a huge liability for you. In the case of child pornography, someone could park in front of your house and download thousands of images and be on their way in mere moments, leaving you with the IP footprint of their activity. There are also hacker types that piggy back on free wifi to do their hacking the identity of someone else.

If you have an open router at your church or if you don’t have a content filter setup on the router level, the potential for something like this to happen is very likely. A couple of years ago, someone from our private school downloaded a bootleg movie. Two weeks later, our administrator received a letter from our ISP saying that we potentially could be sued by the movie house and our ISP contract dropped. The movie house then followed up with a royalty bill for several thousand dollars.  Our network was secure, but we weren’t filtering properly. After this incident, we setup opendns.com to filter out all types of content and it took care of the problem.

There are two main steps to making your network safe:

1. Security – Setup a secure network password. I use a random password generator for my router. I also use MAC filtering to only allow computers I trust on my network.  Also, make sure your router’s browser access password is changed from the default settings. I use a random password for this as well and store it on a hard copy in a secure location.
2. Filtering – It’s good to have a content filter on your local machine, but this has no effect on the rest of the computers on the network. I use OpenDNS because it integrates right into my router settings. This gives me control to block any sort of content I choose for everyone who is logged into my router.

If you don’t have either of these in place, please take a strong warning from me that you need to do it immediately! You potentially could be adding liability to your family, work place, or church. You can do this for free. If you have any questions, shoot me an email or leave a comment below.

I just found this awesome service that allows you to use your smart phone, iPod or iPad to accept credit cards. Several respected friends of mine use this and they are thrilled. Signup is free. There are no hidden fees or setup costs. Within a week after signing up you get a small swiper that plugs into your device and you’re ready to start accepting payments.

This is awesome for small churches who want to allow members and guests to give via CC. This is also a huge improvement on how churches deal with registration costs for conferences/camps for all ages.

Within two minutes, I was signed up after verifying some personal details (similar to online credit report) and on my way with the confirmation that my device was being sent to me this next week.

I’m looking forward to using it and letting you know how it works. If you have any experience, please post in the comments area.

Go to Square Up now

- disclosing your entire email list in the TO: field on mass emails.

There are a few arguments that should sway you away from this awful practice:

• It disenfranchises your audience. When I see I’m just one of 200 emails, I feel like a number and I automatically begin prejudging the email and the one who sent the email. The message is certainly lost or tainted before it can even be read. With the proper tools readily available at our fingertips (in all email programs), it is frankly unprofessional to send a mass email exposing your entire email list.  It is tantamount to the practices of my grandmother’s forwarding group who sends me cute kitten photos and Maxine comics on a regular basis.
• It exposes your audience to unwanted spam. All a reader needs to do is hit “Reply All” on your email, and he now has access to your audience. For church email lists, you have not only provided an email list, but more specifically, a targeted, demographic email list. This is extremely valuable to marketers. If one of your users is a marketer or the email falls into the hands of a marketer via hack or snoop, it’s pretty much guaranteed someone down the line is going to go after your audience with a product or pitch. The more people you add to the TO: field, the more you expose your audience to third party communication.I recently contacted a church leader who exposed more than 200 emails on his list announcing a larch church-oriented music event. I explained the nuances of allowing others to have access to his audience. No sooner had I sent the reply, a singer who was on the list replied to all with an advertisement of his latest album and how to purchase it.  Case-in-point.
• It is a liability to you and your organization. No one can please everyone all the time. No matter who you are, there is someone who is disgruntled with your organization and your leadership style. There is a reason the Bible says bitterness is a “root”. You can’t see it on the surface, therefore you can never trust that everyone in your 200+ email list has the best intentions for your organization. When you disclose your email list, you in effect, are giving a microphone to those who are disgruntled with you or your organization.This is a very real scenario not only in church and organization splits, but also when an every day layman looks to get maximum broadcast and collateral damage when airing their grievances.

The Fix

It’s very simple. Use the Blink Carbon Copy or BCC: field when sending to multiple recipients. Place your own email in the TO: field.

A Better Fix

Use MailChimp to send one email to one person on your list until everyone on your list receives the email instead of sending one email to hundreds. Mailchimp is free to use for up to 1000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month.

Using a mailing list services gives you several benefits.

1. Credibility with your audience by allowing them to opt in/out of your emails.
2. Track each email so you know if it’s been opened and read
3. Gain new members via web form on your site
4. Better subscriber management
5. More stable email platform for mass mails than Outlook or web-based email.

There is really no excuse to continue using Outlook for mass emails (over ten or twenty people) when MailChimp is free for the taking.

Go to MailChimp

I love building websites, but I hate working with multiple, multiple, multiple browsers. Basically some elements of your web design display differently in different browsers and you need to target those specific browsers with a stylesheet that fixes the issues.

Lately, I’ve found that Google Chrome and Safari (webkit browsers) display some elements differently depending on what operating system you use. For example, a website I developed looked great on the PC Chrome browser, but when I viewed in the Mac Chrome browser, it had several issues. So, in order to fix this, I created a specific Mac Chrome stylesheet. These styles only load if a user is on a Mac and is viewing with Chrome.

(more…)

Here are a couple of my pet-peeves when viewing a website:

Under Construction

I don’t know a soul that enjoys driving through construction on the highway, so why are labeling your website as a construction zone? You see the big picture vision for your website, your viewers only see what you post. If you have an idea for a certain page, but haven’t developed the content yet, no one will ever know your intentions if the page doesn’t exist. It fairs much better for your website if you have the skeleton structure of information rather than an empty shell of your future vision tagged by “Under Construction” and maybe a cheesy animation image. The rule-of-thumb here is if you don’t have anything to deliver content-wise, do not create a page as a placeholder.

There are some things “Under Construction” communicates to your audience:

• Disorganization
• Lack of Professionalism
• Inexperience
• Lack of vision
• Lack of follow-through
• Laziness

I would rather see a website with minimal pages that have relevant content, than see a huge page structure with no content meat. Is your website a ghost-town with undeveloped content areas? If so, get rid of the slack and focus on a few pages that communicate effectively to your audience. Chances are if your audience sees “Under Construction” they won’t be returning anytime soon. (more…)

Dreamhost offers a free web hosting package if you can supply them a 501.c3 determination letter.  If you’re starting out, this is a great deal that will save you anywhere from $75-$200/year for your church.

Go To Dreamhost