The problem with most church websites today is that alot of people still dont know how to fully utilize them for their own benefit. Lots of church sites including this one offer quite a few nice convienences but the problem is people are either misinformed, they dont know about it, or they do know about it but aren't sure how to use it. This article will explain the many ways you can use the Niagara Frontier Bible Church website.
There are a few main things the website can be used for:
1) Information
2) Evangelism
3) Personal Conveineince
The information part is mostly anything on the site that involves info you need. The news and upcoming events part of the homepage is there for anyone involved at the church to keep them aware of things happening and events they might want to attend, be involved in, etc.
The evangelism part is obviously for reaching others, mostly through the sunday sermons being placed online for public view.
When I say personal conveineince, im talking about the many things that are on the church website that can help you out, more specifically when it comes to the media ministry.
The Media Ministry
Other than watching the sermons on the site, you can easily listen to them, burn them to a CD for yourself, or give them out to others. The issue is alot of people dont realize how simple it is to do.
To listen to a sermon you have two options. You can either download it, or listen to it by streaming the file in the NFBC podcast. What is a podcast? Its basically a public broadcast online for all to see, where anyone who searches for a certain podcast can find it, and listen to the recordings that podcast has laid out. There are 1000's of them on many different topics and NFBC has its own, directed towards broadcasting the sunday sermons.
Downloading:
Downloading the sermons is a great way to archive the sermons on your computer, or just listen to them. To download any sermon you need to go to the media page on the NFBC website seen here.
Click on the tab up top called Watch Online.
This will bring you to a page with last weeks sermon on it. If thats not what your looking for, scroll down the page and you'll see an archive of every sermon since April 06. Highlight the one you would like and click Go.
This will bring you to the corresponding sermon page and you'll see a couple things. The video on the page, the description, and some links.
Sermon MP3 - The audio file for the sermon.
Sermon MOV - The video file for the sermon (the same video being loaded on the page, instead of waiting for it there, you can download it yourself!).
PDF Notes - The sermon in a written form for you to read.
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To download any file on the size you need to Right-Click the link and choose Save-Target As. Then you can choose where you want to save the file on your computer and it will download. Note: Simply clicking the link will cause the file to begin downloading, but not saving it anywhere, so if its a video or audio file it wont show up until the download is complete. Its much easier to download it to your hard drive and open it from there.
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Streaming:
Streaming is a good option if you have a slower internet like dialup.
Before you can stream the sermon audio files you must have iTunes which can be downloaded here.
Right on the main page of the website in the lower right corner there is an image that says Check out our podcast.
After a few moments iTunes will open the to the NFBC podcast page. Below you'll see the sermons that have been added. A simple click will start the file you choose. Its that simple.
You can even subscribe to the podcast so when a new sermon is added it automatically is downloaded to your computer. Towards the top you should see the Subscribe button.
Also if you would like to download an episode of the podcast to the right of each episode will be a Get Episode button that will download the one you choose.
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Troubleshooting:
Here's some common questions that I get regarding the media on the website.
Q: Why are the filesizes so large?
A: Most sermons are about 30mins+, then add onto that the gospel message at the end. So your talking an average for 35mins of video. The standard guideline for internet video is appoximetely 3MB per minute at the frame size we make our videos (320x240 pixel size). So the file size is simply as big as it is because of the length of the video.
Q: Why is the video so small?
A: Just like the previous question, its a good medien to be at. The larger the frame size, the larger th file size. 320x240 is a happy medium to be at to keep file sizes at a satisfactory level.
Q: Why doesn't the video play in my browser?
A: This is a common problem and its a simple fix. Quicktime is required to play our video, more specifically Quicktime 7. The reason for this is it allows us to encode the videos at higher quality, for smaller file sizes. Its much better than Windows Media or Realplayer. The common issue people have is they see a Q where the video should be and it never loads, or a Q with a question mark appears. To fix this go here.