Since the launch of the new website, it's been fun to watch the traffic and various referrers. All of our sites now use a customized version of awstats and we have much better data than in the past.
One thing that is so funny to watch, though, is strange links from other church websites. We track when a request is made for a file on our server that cannot be found and since the launch, we've had a lot of these. A little investigation reveals something we've seen many times over the years - there are a lot of church websites that actually serve images directly from our server!
Of course, designs and images are borrowed liberally across the web (how many Photoshop graphics start with a search of Google Images?), but it takes it to a whole new level when you create a page that actually pulls live images from someone else's site.
You would be surprised at how many websites have large image not found messages on them this weekend because the links are no longer valid. I'm sure they'll discover them soon enough and then probably try to locate the images on the new site. Unfortunately, most are gone; we wanted a fresh start so about the only images we moved over were ministry logos.
It certainly doesn't cause us any harm and I wish them all the best, but it is funny to see. I wonder how often this happens in the corporate world? If you come across red x's this week on a church site, you might want to view the source, just for the fun of it.
I do remember the 2005 C3 conference when Ed Young said a couple of times "use your eyes, plagarize!"
unfortunately some people must have taken that a little too literally!
and why in the world don't they use "right click, copy" ???
new site looks great, kudos to all who worked on it!
Posted by: Paul Podraza | February 12, 2006 at 05:45 PM
Wow, that is pretty sad. I've had that happen a few times with my own site, but didn't think that actual churches got ripped off as often as designer's sites. You could always be really mean and serve them alternate pictures: "Come to church anytime for your free leather-bound, name-embossed Bible!"
Posted by: Nathan Smith | February 12, 2006 at 06:20 PM
You probably have more bandwidth than you need (or no limit) but I accidently shut down someones site once. I had set their site as my secretaries hompage and it played a large Mp3 everytime the page loaded. Two weeks later, the site wasn't there. Instead was a message about how these people had exceeded their bandwidth. Linking to pictures instead of copying them to your own server could do the same thing to someone, especially if they are large pictures or an audio file.
Posted by: Chris Marsden | February 13, 2006 at 03:17 PM
Hopefully, there's an option to turn off hot-linking from your server's control panel. That's an option you really should use. As you've seen, somebody can potentially do a lot of damage just by linking your images to their sites. There's a script you can even run that shows a "You're stealing our bandwidth!" message every time somebody tries to do just that.
Posted by: Rick | February 13, 2006 at 05:18 PM
Paul: Yes, we find our images in multiple places, but linking directly to our site is a whole new level. Thanks for the compliment on the site!
Nathan: We've already spent way too much time imaging the graphics we could replace them with :)
Chris: Yes, we have a nice connection for our sites from the good folks at Colo4Dallas.
Rick: Thanks! I'll see what our options are.
Posted by: Brian | February 16, 2006 at 10:48 PM