First Parish Church - Home Page

First Parish Church Web Site Policies

These World Wide Web pages provide internal and external communication. They contain information about First Parish Church, its organization, people, programs, policies, and procedures. The site has been available to the public since November 29, 2000.

Webmasters: Paul Penfield, Jr. and Betsy Gibson

Webdesign and layout created by BottomOfTheGarden.com

CGI scripts created by Paul Penfield, Jr.

Availability

The site is made available without charge to all who seek its information. The only pages with restricted access are

Some pages may contain copyrighted material, which is used with permission and for which the normal copyright rules apply.

You are invited to browse these pages for the information you want. Your comments about them are welcome.

Some pages on other Web sites, linked from this site, may not be available to all visitors. The First Parish Church is not responsible for the style, content, or availability of pages not on its server. When resources linked from this site are not universally available, that fact is generally noted near the link. Visitors who discover broken links or who have difficulty accessing resources linked from this site are encouraged to send a comment to the webmaster to that effect.

Style

This site is intended to supply the most information content, with pleasant but not fancy graphical design. The content changes relatively slowly. There are no distracting, attention-getting devices such as moving images, frames, unexpected sounds, unusual colors, large fonts, or advanced media. This style is unlike that of typical commercial sites. The pages are designed to be pleasing when rendered by the popular browsers on the popular platforms using default settings. In particular, these pages can be viewed satisfactorily with browser windows of various widths on computers with small screens, although for best results the browser window should be at least 500 pixels wide.

The annual archives of this site are intended to be a permanent resource.

Accessibility

To make the pages accessible to those using text-only browsers, or those using text-to-speech systems, all images have alternate text forms. To help those accessing the site through a low-speed modem, pages are kept to a minimum size (seldom over 50k) and images are reused as much as possible.

Usage

The site home page is typically accessed 150 time per month, and all the other pages on this site together are accessed another 900 times. A running total of the number of accesses of each page in the Web site is kept. In addition, the following information is logged for each home-page access:

Summaries of usage are available for those who may be interested.

In addition, the organization that hosts this site and operates the server keeps a log of requests which includes the client's IP address and/or domain name, time and date, URL of the resource requested, and the outcome of servicing the request.

Privacy

By policy this site does not place cookies on visitors' computers, nor does it attempt to track the movement of visitors within the site, other than to tally the total requests for each page. Because its pages are all available to the public, no mechanism for registering visitors is necessary. The only exception to this policy is that access to the restricted resources noted above requires use of a password. Cookies are used to implement this access restriction.

The site inquiry form requires a visitor's name and e-mail address. Also, there may be other forms used for communication with the church staff. Use of these forms may require personal information such as name or e-mail address. This information, from fields that visitors explicitly fill out, is used only for the purpose of communication with the visitor, or fulfilling the request, and is not shared with other organizations.

Except for the forms discussed in the previous paragraph, no personal information (names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, etc.) is gathered about visitors to this Web site. The log data (time, host, IP number, etc.) collected as described in the "Usage" section above is not distributed to the public. Aggregate results and statistics derived from this data may be made available from time to time to the general public. However, such statistics will not reveal the identity of individual remote hosts by either domain name or IP address, although they may identify higher-level domains or networks by name. Also, such statistics will not disclose the URLs of referring pages, although they may identify higher-level domains associated with such URLs.

Robots

This site is regularly visited by Web robots, and does not either encourage or discourage them. The site is indexed by all the major search services.

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Created: Sep 2, 2000   |   Modified: Mon, Dec 11, 2006