Other Web Sites:

About MAPC

Our Web Site

Web Update (December 3, 2001)

A Brief History of the Website

MAPC's site was launched in June 1995. The site now includes over 450 sermons covering all three years in the Revised Common Lectionary, as well as an overview of the many ways in which our congregation strives to participate in God's work in this world.

Web Editing Tools

Over the past five years, we have used several different tools to maintain the site. I developed the first protptype on a Macintosh in TeachText in one night. For the first year, a Macintosh and Nisus Writer were the main tools. When I saw how easy it was to create tables with SoftQuad's HotMetal Pro, we switched over, and I began using a Windows 95 PC more often. We used a few versions of HotMetal until we switched to NetObjects Fusion in 1998. The sermons were still edited in HotMetal because it does a much better job at importing word processor files than any other web editor I've seen. I switched over to Macromedia Dreamweaver in 1999, using the "Clean Up Word HTML" feature to get the sermon text into the site. In June 2000, we moved the rest of the site over to Dreamweaver and we rolled out a new look for the site in October 2000.

Bible Links

We have made a few technological leaps in how the site is maintained. Over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1998, I wrote a Perl script to find Bible references and link them to Gospelcom's web Bible. You can see the fruits of this labor throughout the sermon texts. The next step in the evolution of our sermon archive is making a database of all of the sermons. This database will make it easy to prepare different indices of the sermons for the website. We hope to automate the lists of links to the latest sermons and parallel sermons written for the same lectionary texts three years earlier. Eventually, we hope to load all of the sermon texts into our database so that all of the site's pages will look consistent without us manually fixing over 200 sermon pages.

Audio

We have posted the 60-second evangelism radio spots from WQXR since 1996. During the restoration of the sanctuary, a compact disc recorder was added to the audio system in the sanctuary. Since February 2001, we have been posting high-quality web audio of the weekly sermons. We now keep the last several weeks of sermons online so that they can be played through the free RealAudio player.

Search

In November 2000, we added a search feature to the site. It currently appears in the center of the home page.

How the Site is Maintained

Michael Bart, MAPC's Communications Director & Systems Administrator (who produces the UPDATE newsletter and most of the church's other publications) and I use Macromedia Dreamweaver to create and maintain the content pages of the site. Michael gathers appropriate articles and notices from the newsletter and other sources and spends several hours a week throughout the year keeping the content fresh. The sermon lists on the homepage are maintained by our sermon database which generates these lists automatically. Fred Anderson writes all of his sermons in MS Word and Michael uses Dreamweaver to convert these files to properly-formatted HTML.

For graphics in the site, I use several different programs. For navigation buttons and banners I use Macromedia Fireworks. For scanning and retouching photographs, I use Adobe Photoshop with a final conversion to JPEG or GIF through ImageReady.

Each Monday, Michael cleans up the audio of the sermon from Sunday's service and converts it to RealAudio format for posting.

Our Philosophy of Site Development

We are always working to improve the website so that it better serves lay people and pastors from around the world, as well as our local community. We have always held back from using the latest technological features in the site, instead focusing on the timeliness and thoroughness of the content. The site is designed to be accessible to all users whether they have text-only browsers, screen reading software for the visually impaired, wireless devices like Palms or PocketPCs or the latest versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer. We place text menus at the bottom on every page so that users don't need to see the graphics of the top menu bar. We have avoided HTML frames because they would not add much to the user interface of the site and would be detrimental to the experience of many users. As we enhance the site, we may begin to use Javascript for more dynamic navigation, but we will always make sure to design the pages so that users of older or less sophisticated browsers will not be locked out of any part of the site.

Future Plans

I am close to completing the sermon database, making it possible to reformat the sermons' web pages as the site's design changes and add new features consistently to all of the sermons. This will also make it easier to update the sermon indices, especially lists where we match sermons based on the lectionary year and day (as in the list on the home page showing sermons for the same lectionary texts side by side). Having a database instead of static web documents will enable site users to sort sermons by date, Revised Common Lectionary reference, scripture readings, etc.

In the future also want to add a weekly and/or daily lectionary to the site. This feature would encourage regular visits to our homepage.

As always, it is especially important to keep the content fresh and keep encouraging visitors to come to our real world church and--most important--to encourage all people to accept Christ in their lives.

— Doug Yasso

Douglas Yasso, who created the MAPC web site, is the president of Data Design, an electronic publishing and web design firm in Manhattan.