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CURRENTLY ON THE WEB
Conference can help with church web sites

Marshall Janzen

This is the third of a series of columns aimed at helping churches make use of the Internet. Previous columns discussed Internet basics and constructing the church web site foundation.

Part of my job description as webmaster for the Canadian MB Conference is to assist Canadian MB churches in communicating through the Internet. To that end, there have been a number of new developments on the Canadian Conference web site (www.mbconf.ca). The Conference’s goal is not to make money from our web site. Instead, we want to serve members (both churches and individuals) and provide information about our beliefs to those who are searching.

We offer a number of Internet services and resources to our member churches, and many of them are quite new. Perhaps your church could benefit from some of them.

Cut costs with Conference hosting

www.mbconf.ca/comm/hosting/

Unless you are hosting your church site on a free service, it is likely that we have a hosting plan that can save you money. Even if you use a free service, we offer advantages you probably will not get elsewhere. You can manage email accounts directly, create mailing lists, use advanced server-side programming languages, and view detailed statistics of web traffic, updated daily. Of course, there are no ads forced onto your pages, and I offer personal technical support if you have problems with your site.

Our plans start at $50 per year for 5 mb of web space. The money received offsets some Conference web site hosting costs. Other plans offer more space, as well as support for RealAudio, streaming MP3, databases, and more. If you have a church web site or are planning to start one, please check our hosting plans to see if they fit your needs.

Promote your site in our church directory

www.mbconf.ca/main/1/

Our “Find A Church” directory allows people to enter their postal code to find MB churches nearby. People can also browse the church listings by province. Over 1000 people locate a church using this service each month.

No matter where your site is hosted, we would love to know about it so we can put a link to it in our “Find a Church” database. You can send us your church web site address online and we’ll post it on our pages within a few days. It is also good to make sure the rest of the information in our database is up-to-date, such as your church’s mailing address and phone number.

Expand your site by linking to our content

www.mbconf.ca/faithlife/

www.mbherald.com

www.encountergod.com

The links above are just a starting point to browsing the material we have available. All the Faith & Life pamphlets on social issues are online, as is the Confession of Faith (in sidewalk, digest, complete, and downloadable versions). All recent MB Herald issues are available on a separate web site, and our evangelistic Encounter magazine has its own address as well. We encourage you to link to whatever material you feel will be useful to visitors to your site. It is simple to do and allows your web site team to focus on creating content that does not already exist on the Internet.

Marshall Janzen is webmaster for the Canadian MB Conference, and a member of Parliament Community Church in Regina. He can be reached at marshall@launch.ca.

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Last modified November 5, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
Masthead and usage information.