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Easy, affordable ideas to maximize your site potential

If it's Saturday night and you need a little help finishing Sunday morning's sermon, you're in luck--assuming you have Web access. No matter what your denomination, you can gather from or donate to the 30,000 sermons, outlines, ideas and illustrations already available at www.SermonCentral.com, the premiere sermon resource center. Currently attracting more than one million page views per month, resources are searchable by topic, book of the Bible, author or denomination. As a contributor, you'll receive a $25 Outreach Marketing gift certificate for every 10 sermons submitted and a monthly e-newsletter featuring the Top 10 most-viewed sermons, plus the latest preaching trends, statistics and resources.

Service U Corporation (www.serviceu.com) offers you a variety of Web tools that lighten the loads of both church and user. TransactU, an e-commerce-enabling solution, lets church members to register and pay for events, make donations and view a history of their past contributions any time day or night. They can even order books or other items from the church store or various fundraising groups. TransactU costs $39.95 per month with an average 2% transaction fee regardless of church size.

EventU, a scheduling system, lets users schedule recurring events, prevent room scheduling conflicts, manage support systems (food service and AV, for example), publish events to the site, customize questions to ask when visitors when they sign up for an event, and export the event calendar in MS Excel and Outlook. The program ranges from $29.95 to $299.95 depending on church size.

SpectorSoft (www.spectorsoft.com), which acts much like a PC surveillance camera, has sparked recent privacy debates in numerous magazines (Time, Fortune and Business Week, to name a few) and on television programs, including NBC Nightly News and Good Morning America. Although the software is also being promoted as a "spying" mechanism for suspicious spouses, developers point out that it is also appropriate for adults who are concerned about what children are doing on-line or are worried about protecting their children from the dangers of the Internet.

For less than $100, you can install and start recording PC and Internet activity with SpectorSoft in less than 10 minutes. It works by taking hundreds of snapshots every hour, recording chat conversations, instant messages, e-mails typed and read, all sites visited, all programs/applications run, all keystrokes typed--in short, everything done on the computer and the Internet.

According to SpectorSoft developers, this program is not a filtering program. In fact, they say, SpectorSoft is more effective. "We believe that recording what people actually do is the best way to keep them from inappropriate sites," says one SpectorSoft spokesperson. "When people know they may be watched, they are much more careful about what they do."

Presenters University, an on-line resource for presenters of all levels, is offering a free collection of 10 Presentations™ Masters for computer users who depend on Corel® Corporation's Presentation software for digital presentations. Similar to PowerPoint®, Corel Presentations is included with WordPerfect Office software to provide presenters with easy-to-use presentation software. Presentation Masters offer a variety of template choices, from vibrant and colorful to soft and subdued. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, military, government and patriotic masters have been added to the collection. Corel Presentations Masters can be found at www.presentersuniversity.com under "Multimedia Downloads."