The preacher, the barn, and the unpainted wall

Harry Layden has been preaching around Tulsa for decades, and he’s had a website for the better part of twenty years — the Wayback Machine has it running as far back as 2008.

It was built on a free page template of that era, and — like a lot of small-ministry websites — it was never quite finished. The template’s own demo text was still sitting on the homepage all those years later, right where the builders left it. Out where we’re from, we’d call that a barn with one unpainted wall. Everybody means to get to it. Nobody ever does. And after a while, honestly, nobody sees it anymore.

Meanwhile, Harry kept preaching.

Forty-seven hours of Bible study — video and audio, whole walks through Matthew, James, First and Second Peter, Esther — piled up on the server over the years. And almost none of it could be reached from the site. Six videos out of sixty had a working link. The sermon archive page had 128 links on it and 102 of them were broken. The study handouts folks actually wanted were sitting in a folder no page pointed to. The introduction video for Harry’s couples conference had been dead so long it was still asking for Windows Media Player.

Here’s the thing we want to say plainly: none of that was anybody’s fault. It’s just what happens to a website that gets hosted but never looked after. Hosting keeps the lights on. Care is somebody actually walking the fence line.

One evening with the new tools

This year we started using AI-assisted rebuilding tools alongside our own two hands, and Harry’s site was one of the first through the shop. In one evening we:

• audited every page and every link on the site — all of them, not a sample;
• rebuilt every page to work on phones (the old design predates the smartphone by a full three years);
• matched every sermon recording to its study notes, and rebuilt the archive so the whole library finally plays right on the page;
• found 55 study handouts sitting on the server that no page had ever listed — online now for the first time;
• brought the couples conference video back from a format last seen in the Bush administration;
• and changed not one word of Harry’s. Same pages, same message, same phone number. Just a straighter barn.

C:\SMALLPLANET> compare harrylayden.com /before /after
                          BEFORE       AFTER
  videos you could reach  6 of 59      60 of 60
  audio you could reach   34 of 89     86 of 89
  study handouts online   47           189
  broken links            102          0
  works on a phone        no           yes
C:\SMALLPLANET> 

And about those bots

Here’s a detail we’re a little proud of. The old site’s robots file — the note that tells search engines where they’re welcome — had it exactly backwards. It was blocking Google from the sermons people actually searched for, while leaving nine gigabytes of video wide open for scrape-bots to chew through Harry’s bandwidth all night.

The new site does the opposite. People stream freely. Bots get a polite no at the door. In the first year of logs we counted, the crawlers and scrapers outnumbered the humans something like fifty to one — so that one fix matters more than it sounds.

Before and after