Tennis Ambassador Christian Ministry Newsletter

Love to Serve News April 15, 1999

I am often asked, How did you develop a ministry over the Internet? How did you find my email address? Find our helpful links for websites at the bottom of this letter. This month's newsletter has been written to answer your questions and to encourage those who are interested in developing an Internet based ministry.

First some basic statistics for the Internet:

Even in a closed country like China, internet users doubled from 505,000 to 1.175 million in the six months up to July 98, and are expected to reach 5 million by 2000 (CNN Dec, 98)
The number of people using the Internet worldwide will double to 300 million by 2005 with the greatest growth in Asia and South America. The number of netusers will rise 61% to 95 million in the US, more than double to 88 million in Europe and quadruple to 118 million in the rest of the world. (Datamonitor)
In 1998 there were 153 million Internet users worldwide, a sharp jump from 3 million in 1994. (Bill Gates)
1.5 million new web pages are created every day! (Alexa navigation helper)
Most students in most countries have free access to the Internet, and will want to keep it after graduation. Among graduates and young professionals, Internet access in many countries may be as high as 90 per cent! (Web Evangelism Guide)
Every day, 90,000 people gain Internet access for the first time! (CNN Dec, 98)

Clearly, this is a ministry that can have an immediate impact and will increase as an interactive communication tool in the future. All ministries that rely upon communication and prayer support, and that is most, needs to be establishing an Internet presence. Individuals need to have a simple Internet presence with their areas of interest. While Internet usage is not in all countries in the world, it is in most, and growing. In one month my ministry established a presence in over 65 nations with over 2000 email contacts. Our email contact list has been our basic building block. Our second block has been an Internet website, that is offered as an additional service to our email friends, and at the same time recruits new friends who are using the Internet and searching for information. Our third block will be developing the services on our website that our database is requesting.

I would like to briefly share with you my own experience as to how I developed this presence worldwide with a minimum of experience and time. In 1996 I was computer illiterate. In fact I feared turning on the computer. Like many of you I hoped to use it for word processing and saw it as an improvement over a typewriter. After learning the basic skills, I began to find software programs that were interesting and assisted me in my ministry such as newsletter publications, accounting, research tools and other programs. Soon after I learned how to send and receive email and began to explore the Internet and webpages. I saw that the tools existed to network together the world of tennis players in a way that was cost efficient and quick. I lacked reaching out to other players based upon the time and cost of using the post office. I am at the stage now that I am learning all the necessary tools from the Internet, such as search engine skills, and new developments to see this ministry have a strong web presence.

Setting up a minimum of a WebPage is very easy and can be done by all computer novices on the net with today's tools offered by many web providers. Many are free and can be set up in one hour or less. After a few hours a novice can design a more mature website presence such as pictures, and interactive features. It does require some time learning as you search for what a free Web design provider will offer and how to apply it, but it is only a few hours.

The next stage will be offering more complex tools such as Java or CGI-script. These offer tools that make your site more professional and interesting to the viewer. Such items as date clocks, scroll down menus, moving animations and interactive tools are examples. It is becoming more common to find these tools offered by services on the net for free. However I have found that most services are very user friendly and once installed require no service time. A good way to find free web features is to look at other sites and then to find the link to that feature. The advantage of this is that a novice can add them to a website immediately and for free. The disadvantage is that you are dependent on another source for this service and can not control what will happen to the service in the future. It also takes a little longer to download your site as all services such these will go to their homesite. A programmer can also design all of the item's mentioned above into a WebPage. I work with a person who has this experience and has volunteered his time to our ministry. Several Christian missions are on the net that will design a web page for free or at low-cost. After a basic web page is up, changes and improvements are continual. A basic WebPage can be put up in a few hours with today's HTML tools, such as Netscape Composer or FrontPage.

An important feature of your website should be your Interactive tools for communication. I have visited many websites that offer no means to communicate comments to the author. Email and instant conferencing can be added to a site in a few minutes. One way is to work with an existing provider with the limitations mentioned above, or develop with a programmer the source code into you WebPages. The latter requires the services of a professional programmer. It has been my experience that the first step in developing Interactive tools is to build an email database, then to develop items such as guest books, message boards and instant conferencing. The common denominator among the website and your visitor is often email. ICQ (Internet conference) seems to be the hot communication tool of the moment but this may change as new tools come out. In the more developed Internet nations the complicated aspects of the Internet will grow in usage slowly as they improve.

My web site is now at this stage. We are in the process of building our own source code for Interactive tools into our site. At the moment we are using providers for our interactive tools and we are developing our own code for a guest book. While the providers of our guest book and other tools have been very good, at times the providers' website is down and then the tools they offer can not be accessed. This happens very infrequently, however.

The last stages for website development are areas such as videos on demand. This seems to be an area of interest to a growing number of users as they install video applications. The limitation of these is that it takes additional time to download the video. New technology is being developed to solve this problem. This is a very good tool for making your site information come alive.

Developing an email base is time consuming, but can be very rewarding. The initial development of an email base can take from 1-3 months, depending on how much time is allocated to it. Our email database growth for the first 6 months was as follows:

Initial database: 30 email addresses
Searching the net and magazines for addresses: 2500
Our website signup: 25/month
Referrals from other websites: 40
Unsubscribe: 175

After this the administration of the base is very easy and can take as little as 30 minutes a week. The first stage is to access your existing database through your email addresses. They are the people who have an immediate interest in you. All paper literature that is distributed by you should have both your email and WebPages address on it. Then, using the Internet search engines, you can find sites that have a common interest. We used key words, such as tennis, church, pastor, missions, etc. This will give you an immediate database. While many will not wish to have emails offered by you, many will. You should include a statement that they may unsubscribe if they wish. We had about 7% unsubscribe. We are now in the process of building our database by posting information to newsgroups and mailing lists offered by various providers. We are receiving new members with email addresses signing up at our website at a current rate of approximately 20 a month. An additional source of building an email database is to target your market of interest and then advertise in publications and magazines. This will get the word out to a large number of people for a fixed cost. We are advertising in two publications, Tennis Magazine and USPTA Magazine and have had immediate results. Publications that are written with an email address as a contact are also a good source for your database. My suggestion is that you always include your email address in the advertisement, as most people will have this access. Then if space permits, you can include your Webpage address and, lastly, use both. I have also found that sites on the Internet that will link your site to theirs are a very good source of increased traffic flow. The best way to do this is to visit sites of common interest and ask them to link to you. Have a standard letter to send them. Finally post your webpage to search engines. This should not be done first, but last, as you want your site to be as close to finished as possible before the search engine lists it. Each of your web pages should have Meta tags and descriptions. This will increase your chances of being listed correctly. You also should include the key words that you select near the top of the body of the page. This will give you a higher position on the engine. I think that it is beneficial to list on each search engine individually. Several services offer listing to multiple engines; however, once listed, you cannot change your description easily, and you have a limitation set by the service on the size of your description. Purchase a domain name that is yours forever. Choose a name that is short and easy to remember. Then no matter what provider you have, or where you store your website, you will have access for others for as long as you keep your domain name. The initial cost is around $75 a year and then drops to $25 a year.

In summary: The design of a WebPage is important. Search the Internet and find sites that you like. Use their site as a basic building tool for yours. While they may have a more developed site than you are capable of starting with, use their basic format. Later you can add features as you develop. After this stage it should take no more than 1-4 hours of your time to have a basic website. After this you may add additional features for web design providers, such as guest books, page counters, message boards, clocks and interactive tools. This should take no more than 10 hours of time, mostly in researching for features that you agree with. Beyond this, it is best to have the services of a programmer experienced with WebPage design. All the tools you desire can be added very quickly this way. Once the website is the way you want it and your email database is built, management of the site is very easy. I spend about an hour a week adding new names to the database and uploading new information to the site. A novice can do this very easily. This does not include the time for composing communication letters, replying to emails, updating your site, and designing new features into your website.

One area that deserves mention is having your site attacked. I am convinced that people exist on the Internet whose purpose is to attack Christian sites. This is why it is very important to have a good backup plan. Develop a mirror site at another location. If you have a problem, then you can forward your viewers to a temporarily site. We have had several attacks and I think it is worthwhile for you to see how they work. You receive emails that will be derogatory in nature. Of course they can be easily deleted. Of a more serious nature are the following:

Posting your email address and name with false messages onto a news group hoping that you will be flamed with messages from others.
Sending you a virus as an attachment. Do not open any attachments from an unsafe source.
Having your site listed on a search engine and then directly under your site description put links to pornographic sites. I still do not know how this was done.

Well, now I hope that this information is helpful to you and I look forward to seeing your ministry growing and reaching out to others.

Blessings,
Rev. Bob Kraft

Multiple Search engines: http://www.dogpile.com/    http://www.37.com/
Domain Registration:       http://www.namesecure.com/
Website promotion:          http://192.41.61.81/promotea.html
Free homepages:              http://www.dreamscape.com/frankvad/free.homepages.html
Site ranking:                     http://www.rankthis.com/
Meta Tags:                       http://www.virtualpromote.com/metatag.html
                                          http://www.metatag.webpromote.com/
Site submission:               http://home.echo-on.net/%7epush/docs/search/engines.html

Christian submission: http://www.topsites.org/
Web Evangelism info: http://www.brigada.org/today/articles/web-evangelism.html#intro
http://www.gentle.org/voice/html/chatroom_advice.html
Witness without webpage: http://www.brigada.org/today/articles/web-evangelism2a.html#ftp

Free fax:                        http://www.afreefax.com/
                                       http://china.syr.edu/fax/verify.html
Internet Phone:             http://www.window95.com/internet/phone.html
Web site maintenance: http://www.websitegarage.com/bin/go
CGI Scripts archive:       http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/
Free guest books:          http://www.freewareconnection.com/guestbooks.html
Misc. freewares for website: http://www.freewareconnection.com/guestbooks.html