Intentions of the church website template

The United Methodist church website template was created by United Methodist Communications and is intended to give United Methodist congregations a starting point in creating a congregational website. It provides a basic website structure and page template.

The template was designed to accommodate a typical small to medium-sized congregational website. It may not be suitable for all congregations' needs.

The template employs a moderately sophisticated page structure; therefore, it is expected that the person who customizes this template for a congregation has moderate understanding of HTML structure and moderate skills at using the HTML editor of choice.

Design constraints of the church website template

Our constraints in creating the template included the following:

• The template should provide a structure that could accommodate a growing website
• The template should be easy to edit for someone with moderate understanding of HTML and moderate skills in using the HTML editor of choice
• It should be possible to customize the template without having to create or edit images for the basic website structure (i.e., page banners and navigational links should be text-based not graphics)
• The template should look presentable in most common graphical browsers (see more on browser compatibility below)
• The template should not employ HTML frames for various reasons
• The template must not contain "advanced" features that may not be supported on many web servers (e.g., feedback forms, streaming audio or video, etc.)
• The template must not contain features that are only supported on version 4+ of Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, or if it does contain such features, the template must look acceptable on earlier versions of these browsers.

Browser Compatibility

The template was designed so that it would look essentially the same on Netscape Navigator/Communicator, version 2 and above, and on Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 2 and above. The template has been tested on Netscape, versions 2, 3 and 4 on Windows 95/NT; Internet Explorer, versions 2, 3, and 4 on Windows 95/NT; Internet Explorer for Macintosh; Opera, version 3.1 for Windows 95/NT; and Lynx for Windows 95.

This template is not designed to be particularly compatible with browsers for the visually impaired, though since it is almost completely text-based (few graphics as part of the basic page structure), almost all elements on the template pages should be accessible through non-graphical browsers.

All content in Dancing on the Web is made available by United Methodist Communications for United Methodist Church use. All Rights Reserved. Copyright ©2001 by United Methodist Communications. Please direct comments to websupport@umcom.umc.org