Web Site Policy

Mission

The purpose of our web site is to 1.) Give people “shopping” for a church home, a detailed, accurate overview of Covenant and encourage their attendance and 2.) Support the mission of the church by providing:

• A well organized, overview of Covenant United Methodist Church and its ministries.
• Information about worship services, events and the church in general.
• A way for church members to stay connected to the church body.

Leadership

The Web Leadership Team will act as the "steward" of the web site on behalf of the whole church. This Web Leadership Team will:

• Design the basic appearance of the web site.
• Assure church staff understands the web site's capabilities and how to use the site.
• Work with church staff and committee chairman assuring the site contains accurate information useful to members and visitors.
• Assist in finding volunteers for the web site and train them in design and site maintenance.
• Handle problems with the web site and volunteers.
• Promote the web site's usage to the membership.

Maintenance Plan

The web site will be designed and maintained by a group of volunteers (The Web Team).

Request for site changes should be sent to info@covenantumc.org. Change request must be approved by a staff member. Any requested changes to the web site will be measured against the site's mission statement, if the proposed change doesn’t line up with the mission, it will not be made.

Pages will be kept up to date. Old information will be removed as it expires and new information should be posted promptly, however, change request that require major structural changes will be treated as a "project" and completion time will vary depending on the web team's work load and the request's impact to other areas of the site.

The Web Leadership reserves the right to alter or remove any page on the web site. Generally, this refers to pages which violate the web hosting policy, the privacy policy, or pages that don't support the mission of the web site or mission of Covenant United Methodist Church.

Design

The web site will:

• Rarely include dated information. Dated information quickly becomes outdated and gives site visitors a bad impression. Dated information will be available on the church calendar maintained by the church office.
• Be designed in such a way as to make it friendly, welcoming and easy to navigate.
• Support and be readable by most browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera).
• Be designed so that it can be viewed by people with disabilities.
• Not include photos captioned with member's names or member's personal information.
• Not include any photos of members without 1.) a signed waver and 2.) approval from person(s) in photo.
• Be designed for easy maintenance by making use of templates (reusable code), external javascript files and style sheets.
• Have limited use of animation and large graphics.
• Not have background music or scrolling text.

Email

Staff email accounts will use the naming convention "first letter first name last name@covenantumc.org". For example John Smith's email account would be jsmith@covenantumc.org.

Safety

The web has the potential to have the largest outreach of any ministry. However, the information placed on the web site can also be dangerous.

Some missionaries serve in sensitive areas. The committee chairman of Missions or Pastor should be consulted before information about specific missionaries or people on mission trips is placed on the web site so their safety is not compromised.