I write these post with churches, ministries and non-profit organizations in mind. That means I make a few assumptions about you if you are reading this.

1. I assume that you don’t have unlimited time.
2. I assume that you don’t have unlimited personnel.
3. I assume that you don’t have unlimited funds.

If you do, skip this article. For that matter, skip anything I have to say. You should be paying someone to tell you things.

Still here? Good. Without getting into the whole Mac vs. PC thing—yet—if you use a PC you have most likely at some time been frustrated with it. Rampant viruses. Crashes. Spyware. And the list goes on.

So does Windoze just go to work the moment you install it, seeking out every possible way to cripple and destroy itself? In its defense—no. Think back to (or imagine) pre-internet days. The only way a virus was going to get on your computer was if you computer was on a local area network or you inserted a contaminated disk into it. Hence, the birth of antivirus software that took forever to scan a floppy disk every time you inserted it.

Then came the internet. Now those nasty critters could invade you PC through email, downloads and hackers. So in addition to your antivirus software, you now need a firewall and a host of other defenses.

There isn’t a magic cure-all (I am biting my tonge since I mentioned I won’t get into the Mac vs. PC thing), but here is one simple thing that you can do. Switch web browsers. Dump Internet Explorer. Why? Go to Google or the search engine of your choice and search for security, Firefox vs. Internet Explorer for several articles that go into far more detail than I care to do here.

In adddition to the overwhelming security reasons to swtich, there are a number of others, with the most important being—it works. A web browser is supposed to do just that—allow you to browse, or view, the web. There are many industry standards that are there to make sure the sites work across multiple browsers. And they do, with one glaring exception—Internet Explorer. Most web developers would quickly write it off except for the fact that about 80% of the general market will view web sites with it.

You may have never even realized that Internet Explorer doesn’t work. That is because web designers and developers like myself spend hours making sure sites do work. We hack code and create work-arounds to satisfy Internet Explorer’s unique code cravings.

OK, I think that’s enough. Any more and it is going to sound like a sales pitch—which, it technically could never be since it is not about a sale at all. Firefox is FREE. Zip. Nada. Zilch.

So what are you waitingfor? Get Firefox Here.

Information. Everybody wants it. A lot of people are more that happy to give it. We print brochures, create ads, mail out flyers and—of course—post as much as we can on the web so people can have our information. Printed materials are generally reviewed much more closely than items that are posted online. We realize that changing something in print tends to be costly and you can’t change it at all once it is on someone’s hands. On the web, things are sometimes scrutinized to a lesser degree.

Unfortunately, this less rigorous review and approval process means that on occasion, content gets posted that really should not be on the web at all. I am not talking about typos or grammatical mistakes, but the actual content itself.

Churches, ministries and many non-profit organizations are unique in that in addition to full-time staff, they depend on a large number of volunteers. Volunteers often lead several ministries such as on-campus and off-campus small group bible studies, support groups, vacation bible school, and the list goes on. As such, volunteers are often the key points of contact for their respective ministries. This makes it very tempting to simply post their personal contact information on the web and direct people to it. In a perfect world—no problem. However, I don’t need to go into a lesson on the depravity of man, to say the world is far from perfect.

When posting any information to your site, realize that someone can easily gain even more information from the little that you gave them. For example, let’s say you list an off campus women’s bible study that meets at 8pm along with a name and phone number. Simply typing in the name or phone into a search engine can quickly display an address, map and driving directions to that person’s location.

There are different tactics that you could try to protect such information, but the best solution is to simply not list personal information on the site at all. Instead, direct them to call the church office, send an email or fill out a form. Anyone legitimately interested should have no problem doing this and it offer some basic safety for your volunteers, especially those in off-campus ministries.