The other day the team of EveryStudent.com faced a decision; use our tool for making new sites automatically for ALL our new language sites, allowing our staff members to easily produce a locally “skinned” EveryStudent.com site, or use a custom-translated site as we have been doing all along.

We answered the question by asking, “What is best for an unbelieving student?”

Our automatic site tool makes it easier for our staff members to reach their campuses, and it allows us to more specifically direct responses to someone close to where they live, but we found that our staff members were not promoting it continually in their local settings. Furthermore, due to the nature of duplicate content in search engine’s databases (it gets blocked), we need to block our “cookie cutter” sites from web crawlers. So no local promotion means no one visits the site. In the end we concluded that an unbelieving student who wanted to learn more about who God is and what it might be like to know Him would be better served by putting our main efforts into a single, main site and centrally promoting it from there, regardless of the site’s language.

I was happy with my new team for keeping our eye on the ball.