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Homepage Guidelines
COB-NET is offering free homepages for Church of the Brethren congregations, districts, agencies, and church camps. We are accustomed to working with congregations in various levels of interaction. Some congregations have web savvy individuals who create everything and send it to us, some with limited experience need a little help, and for some - we do all the work. Originally this document served as a template to explain the basics of web design but with the general increase of public knowledge about these particulars, we have reduced it to a set of guidelines. Please review our expectations and hopefully we can mutually work toward a pleasing web site for your Brethren congregation, district, agency, or church camp.
Quick story on homepages
Site Administrator Ron Gordon is providing free space for your homepage under his own Internet Service Provider (ISP) account. In other words, you would not have your own User ID and Password access for unlimited FTP directory privileges with lots of disk space. All materials would need to be e-mailed directly to him for each update. This arrangement might be cumbersome for some congregations, districts, or agencies with larger visions - the tradeoff is that through COB-NET this opportunity is always free. Even though this may be a little too restrictive for some Brethren organizations, it's a good place to start. For most congregations, this is all the space that they will ever really need. COB-NET is simply extending an opportunity to the Church of the Brethren free of charge. Oh, the technical support and consultation is always free.
Here are a few details which are necessary to have a free homepage maintained through Church of the Brethren Network. Your sensitivity to our mission and respect for our visitors will be greatly appreciated as we endeavor to offer free homepages to everyone.
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5 MegaByte multiple document web site. |
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Contact Person with e-mail address or telephone number. |
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Kid Safe pledge to comply with family oriented standards of content. |
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Extensions through FrontPage are not activated. |
After reading the above, you might wish to ask the following...
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Is 5 MB enough room? - Unfortunately, we can't offer lots of disk space and top level features. COB-NET is a starter opportunity with enough space and features to host a nice multiple document web presence including a modest number of images and photographs. For most congregations, this is all the space that they will ever need. |
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Will you change our stuff around? - Your documents, message content, text positioning, and photos will generally remain as you send them. We will attach an obligatory footer and drop everything into your private folder. Large graphics may be resized to the 'definition' of your image tags for faster loading. For example, suppose that you have a 900x300 image with a file size of 100K that you want to display on your web page at 300x100. Every browser still needs to take the extra time to load the full 100K image! If the image were to be resized to the intended 300x100, it may have a file size of only 20K and load a whole lot faster. The quality remains unchanged and we keep your original images in case things need to be done again from scratch. |
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How long does it take for updates to be online? - Updated material will usually be online the same day, except during the week of Annual Conference. If your updated pages are “web ready” they can be online within hours, even minutes, because we check our e-mail continuously. Extensive photo and graphic work or Java Script programming should be finished within one or two days, and extensive CGI routines for interactive forms may take a few more days. That's right, we do free programming if it's not too extensive. |
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We don't have a scanner - We will give you an address for surface mailing your hard copy materials. |
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We don't understand HTML - No problem. Send us your material, either attached to an e-mail or by surface mail, and we will design your congregational homepage according to your instructions. |
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In what format do you want the text? - Just about any way that you can get it here: ASCII DOS, WordPerfect, Word, Ami Pro, Lotus, or Publisher. |
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We know HTML and have the graphics - Just attach the completed HTML documents, along with each graphic to an e-mail and your work can be online as soon as we receive it. When you desire to change your document content, send only those documents that have been updated. In other words, it is not necessary to re-send each web page and graphic file every time that you submit an update. |
Standards of Content
COB-NET is rated with several family organizations such as Family Friendly and SafeSurf. Our standards are high, perhaps too high, but we wish to assure parents that their children may safely explore these documents and external links without fear of exposure to material which could be deemed inappropriate, confusing, or simply low quality. Every morning, we raise the bar of excellence for ourselves. We set our minds on improving each document for textual content and graphical presentation, so that parents and children may freely walk through our pages to discover the love of God and better understand the culture of the Church of the Brethren - without fear or regret.  Unfortunately, we live in a world that is too often satisfied with low or no standards, and because of increasing disreputable content on too many web sites, plus the growing complexity of parents to successfully monitor their children's access to undesirable material, COB-NET maintains a policy of removing document objects or external links which are deemed substantively inappropriate by our members, and will naturally inform our homepage coordinators if these objections should be voiced towards their documents. (In almost ten yers of operation, this has only happened once. And the matter was quickly and amicably resolved.) Web coordinators are encouraged to utilize their free web presence to inform and educate. We desire for them to take ownership of their homepage but not so as to intentionally or inadvertently abrogate our standards of quality. Our society contains political and theological viewpoints ranging from one extreme to another. Responsible individuals who desire to passionately express controversial opinions may employ the use of creative language to articulate their views without needlessly injuring brothers and sisters of the faith who embrace an opposing viewpoint. Our faith is demonstrated first by love - not words. We therefore remain sensitive to our visitors who present substantive commentary regarding the textual content and graphical composition of our documents and external linkage, and we pledge to continue that vigilance, so that you may confidently surf through and enjoy our web site with an easy mind.
Redirection Services
Our prefix to your district / congregation homepage will always be [ www.cob-net.org/church/ ] which may be too long for some people who would prefer a much shorter, easier to remember web address. You can have that short address and still take advantage of our free homepage offer by using one of the following redirection services. Each web page would still reside with Ron Gordon's private ISP account, but it would 'appear' as though you have your own domain! Most offer domain forwarding, e-mail forwarding (some with aliases), and URL cloaking.
Firms that REDIRECT -- FORWARD e-mail -- HIDE target address
Redirect and HIDE the address
If you want to see how page redirection actually works, just look at the source code behind any of the following web addresses to see how an HTML frame secretively points to COB-NET but hides the actual web address. Pretty neat!
Redirect WITHOUT hiding the address
Depending on your ministry needs, a Redirect Services does not need to "hide" the URL of the targeted web page. Each of the following Domain names simply transfers the visitor to COB-NET without obscuring the process.
“Every man's work shall be made manifest; for the day shall declare it,
because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.”
1 Corinthians 3:13
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