No matter whether you represent a parish, a diocese, a national church, a religious order, a society, or just a committed group of Anglicans, you should have a web page. This section gives information and advice for how to make it, name it, and maintain it.
About 47% of the Anglican dioceses worldwide have some form of web page. This means that the other 53% do not. Perhaps a quarter of the existing web pages were professionally made; the others produced by volunteers. There is not a lot of consistency, commonality of language or appearance, or cross-referencing. Our liturgical and literary heritage is steeped in tradition, but our web pages are very young. These are the early years of the church in cyberspace; we are setting traditions here. Let us set great ones.
To make and publish a web site, you must do these things:
- Decide on content and appearance: decide what your web site will say, and what it will look like. If
your site will not be produced by a professional web designer, then make sure you look at a lot of other sites,
both Anglican and non-Anglican, before you decide. It is almost never appropriate to take a document designed for
paper and transcribe it for the web.
Our section "Content and form" is an introduction to the issues of style and substance in creating web pages for a religious group.
Choose a name. We would like to convince you that, for every diocese, province, national church, order, seminary, and publication associated with the See of Canterbury, that the right choice is to use a name in ANGLICAN.ORG. Our section "Choose a name" explains this in depth. If you are already convinced that you want to use the domain ANGLICAN.ORG, then read our section "Using ANGLICAN.ORG" to find out how to do this. If you are familiar with Internet naming and want to cut to the chase, see our section "Naming Rules."
Choose an ISP. An ISP is an Internet Service Provider. These are the companies that sell connections to the Internet. There are good ones and bad ones, and the industry is still so young that there are risks. Make sure you read our "Choose an ISP" section, and also the "web hosting" section that follows it, before you make a decision about this.
The other sections in this "Make your web site" chapter go into more detail on each of these topics, starting with "About web sites," which explains more about what a web site is and how it works.