Initial impressions are important. As my friend Rick Smith says: “You never get a 2nd chance at a first impression”.

True.

One of the most important “first impressions” is how fast the user can recieve and interpret your content. Faster is better. Period.

I have found that a number of church and ministry websites (and blogs) are extremely content heavy on the initial landing page and/or homepage, requiring the new and regular user to wait. This is probably not the best idea.

But how do you diagnose your speed and figure out what parts of content is slowing down your site?

Try the Full Page Test by Pingdom.

Enter your URL and visually see how your site loads, order, and basic overall stats including:

• Total Load Time – Total time it takes ot load the page including all objects.
• Total Objects – Total number of objects loaded that are related to the page.
• External Objects – Total number of objects from external domains.
• [X]HTML/RSS/XML/CSS – Total number for each.
• Scripts – Total scripts running on your site.
• Images – Total number of images
• Plugins – Total number of plugins
• And more…

It’s not the most comprehensive, but it’ll do the trick for your first jab at it. Take a look at my two sub-10 second websites, ChurchCrunch and Human3rror in the thumbnails.

There are some obvious rooms for improvement, namely the number of scripts and images. I use a lot on ChurchCrunch and I need to spend more time optimizing my images to be more web-ready.

So how does your blog or ministry site roll? Is it a Sub-10 winner?

As the “budget” is being evaluated and ironed out for the FY09 here at the humble ChurchCrunch offices I’ve begun to consider some of the typical ways that businesses spend their marketing monies. Conferences and Sponsorship of Conferences is one of them.

Now, just for clarification, my “budget” at this point is a big fat $0.00. My “offices” is a corner spot in my rented condo next to my daughter’s drawing desk.

So, the next few thoughts are all theory and smoke. But humor me, ok?

ReadWriteWeb has a great piece on their considerations for sponsorship this year. The biggest concern is ROI (Return on Investment). Can the cost of travel, entry fees, materials, preparation, etc give a worth while return?

I’m not sure at this time and certainly the fact that I couldn’t afford it anyway is a big *ahem* roadblock. But, if I had a few greebacks I’m still not sure if I’d do it.

Are you (or your organization) sponsoring conferences this year?  What are your biggest concerns and thoughts?

And… we have a winner for the “I’m a Blogger and I Need a Business Card Contest“!

Durreger… come on down!

Email me bro so I can hook you up with this crazy cool Moo Mini Cards!

How did I decide the winner? I used this virtual die.

Hopefully @duregger will hook us up with an image of what his cards look like when he gets them in the mail.

Contests are fun, huh? We’ll have some more…!

Lycos, once a powerhouse giant with their email service, is shuttering it’s doors for good as one source reports.

For those that were users of the service you may remember the “good times” that the service provided… it was indeed a slick email service and had a number of functionalities that were ahead of it’s time.

It’s user interface was simple and sleek and I, at one point, had more than one account because it was so dope.

But, it’s now in the dead-pool as of February 15, 2009.

Why?

Because underneath all the “business” jargon and reported “classy” justifications of the close-down dance is the simple fact that it couldn’t keep up and was unwilling to make the necessary changes to continue it’s run of success.

I feel like there’s a lesson to be learned here for us as technoevangelists and the throngs of people we engage with daily: From our ministry teams, organizational staff, and those we seek to minister to.

If you’re not willing to make the necessary changes to your organization to engage with the web and online space then I would say that it’s safe to say that you’ve stunted yourself, perhaps in a very big way.

I’m careful in saying all this because not all ministries, churches, or non-profits need deep web engagement, but you need some. I’d say the less web you decide to use the more strategic you must be.

It’s inevitable. How will the “old dogs” learn new tricks? 2 things:

1. They must be willing to adapt.
2. We (those that don’t need to be sold) must be willing to teach.

This powerful formula is gold.

Are you adapting as fast as necessary (and in wisdom)? Are you willing to “teach” those that are willing and ready?