Location, Location, Location

You’re definitely going to look to see where it is and how far it is from your house.  Otherwise you can’t find it!

Whereas it’s important to find out what a church believes, a lot of the time the search engine that they’ve used or the site that they’ve found will let them know specifically the area as well as the type of church you are.

And though some may or may not visit based on your doctrinal statement, if they don’t know where you are, and they don’t have a handy way to find you, how will they find you to visit?

So, make sure that your site easily conveys how to contact you and where you’re located!

Most people, when you talk about wanting a website, want their website to be the most popular thing out there.  They strive to have traffic, to have people checking their site daily—even if they never or rarely change their site.

One of the things that is important for you to do if you want a church website is to figure out its purpose.  Before contacting someone to host it or develop it you need to figure out its purpose and what is realistic.

The Postcard Site

If you do not intend to update it frequently—or at all—it’s best for you to consider you site like a post card, or an ad in the yellow pages.  It’s not going to be something people are going to check daily, but something people who are looking for a church may find and be able to read more about your church.

And it’s important to have a presence on the web, because there’s so much that you can share about your church’s doctrine, activities, etc.  So you’ll want to have this kind of site—and you’ll want to brand your church’s contact information with the site—but you should not be disheartened when your analytics report that few are coming by.

The Media Center

If you’re intending to use your site as a place to hear sermons and perhaps sell things through it, you’re going to want to spend more money and get better technology (think storefronts).  Basically, to store audio or video online isn’t cheap—especially when it comes to the bandwidth of sending something to someone’s browser.  Depending on how you store it, they may download the whole thing, but may only listen to part of it.  For you, it’s as if they heard the whole thing.

If you’re thinking of selling, you’ll need to decide how you’ll take payments and what products are for sale.  There are applications out there that are pretty customizable, and you may want to start with one of them and see what you can make of it.

The Conversation Hub

If you want your site to be high traffic, you’re going to have to provide something for people to come back to every day.  That means you will need new content on a daily (or more frequent basis).

That means that you’ll need to have a blog type feel to it, or have a forum running.  Both of these take a lot of work—both identifying the audience, having people willing to invest the time to write the content, and moderation of the user generated text.  It’s not easy, and I’m not sure how much it buys you, but if you have a large enough congregation and have one that’s well connected to the internet you may be able to get a good share of them to visit your site.

Conclusion

Make sure that you approach the decision about what kind of site you want to have with both eyes open.  Consider the cost—not only monetarily—of each of these kind of sites and invest wisely.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to have a church website.  It’s a great way for people to find out where you’re located, what you believe, and to see what events you have going on.  It’s a great way to have a message presented, and can even bring people in better than that phone book advertisement.

But if you’re expecting your church’s website to be a hub of activity, with a lot of website traffic and lots of users, you best realize that you’re thinking and entirely different animal.

People Live Online

You see, a majority of the people that are online have already gotten involved in one of many places.  They’ve connected with friends on Facebook, they’re reading things on forums, or they have their own blog.  A lot of the features that you could add to your site to get some interaction are already out there, and without a significant “value add” you aren’t going to be able to get them to create another account just so they can talk with people they’re already “friends” with on three different services.

In this online world, what you want to do is to create a presence where they are, rather than try to bring them to you.  You want to create a group in Facebook, have an account on Twitter, and have a blog component to your church website to get content out.  you want them to subscribe to your church through their RSS feed reader or e-mail so they can get the latest information—and you want to promote that you can get that information there.

Just Like the Great Commission

When Jesus sent His followers out to win the lost, He told them to Go..  Same thing applies in the web world today.  You need to get out where the people are, and then have them want to come back.  Then, when you have the people interested in your site as a source of information or edification, you can build it into a place that offers more.

Start static with a little content, and add as people find you.

Joe, The Web Developer

Joe has a great set of skills.  He knows how to write code, can fix problems that the site my have, and he may even be able to give you a good idea on what system to set up and how much you should be paying.

The problem with Joe is that he’s a web developer.  He may not know everything that’s going on in the church well enough ahead of time.  He may not be gifted in language, and he may not posses a gift when it comes to design.

For him, you want to plan to get and keep him involved by providing him with all the data he needs—preferably written by someone with that gift, and you need to tell him when to have it up and when to take it down.  He’s probably reliable, but don’t overtask him.

Susie, The Secretary

Susie knows how to keep things punctual.  She’s been doing it for some time.  She can navigate herself around her favorite word-processor and spreadsheet and knows how to communicate events.

When it comes to websites, she checks the weather and chats with her husband on IM, but doesn’t know much about keying information into a website.

For her, being a church employee means that she has a lot of time, but you have to give her familiar tools.  Either find a way to hook up what she has to she can easily publish her material, or have her provide her stuff to Joe.  The quicker that she can get familiar with the routine the better.

Updates, I Need to Update?

If you want to rank in search engines, you’re going to want to keep your information fresh.  And having what you’re doing—some kind of calendar of events—will  help guests and members know what’s going on.  Static probably means people won’t find your church.

What other types of people keep up church sites?

If you have something that you want done and don’t have the time or knowledge of how to do it, we will also help you to get the features you requested (we may charge a fee depending on what work we have to do).

We can also help you develop content and place it on the site.  We have a service that we offer where we can enter data for you at a low cost.

The problem is that every member of your congregation may have information or pictures scattered throughout the web, and so it will be hard to find it– or they’ll be e-mailing it all over the place and filling up everyone’s e-mail box.

With a Church Website you can have all of these things in one central location.

You can upload photos to your website for all to enjoy– and then if you really want to e-mail a message, you can just e-mail the URL so that everyone can find it.  You can even get creative and write text around the images so that people know a bit of what’s going on.

Have something you want to get to all of your church members?  Simply enter all of your member’s e-mail addresses into your site and you can send a newsletter from one location.  No more having to maintain multiple contact lists in multiple PCs– and you can choose who to grant access and who to deny.

Does your Pastor want to get a message out to the website quickly without having to know complex HTML and other languages?  You can have a blog on your site so that he can type short or long messages to visitors– or simply put some more information from his sermons out for everyone to enjoy.

Yes– One Location for Information is a great thing.

Instead of your announcements and events only residing in your church bulletin, your announcements could be published on the site in either a member’s section or public. By using a feed reader, those that are subscribed to your site would see your announcement and could bookmark it. You can have a list of e-mails and send everything out to those that have subscribed.

The possibilities are endless!

At Purely Churches, we construct a site that allows you to have information about your church prominently displayed on your home page. We also create a calendar so that you can have your events in one convenient location. You can navigate the calendar to see what’s coming up and what has passed.

One of our platforms has a built in RSS source, so you can send out your information via subscription without doing anything! There’s also an e-mail option that will let you send out e-mails every time you have a new announcement.

Don’t know HTML? You don’t have to. We provide an easy to use interface that lets you choose a title, a category, and has a box for easy to enter text as well as uploading images. You can password protect events, and even choose when the event will be displayed on your site!

Don’t have a church web site? Contact us now!

Over the next several weeks, I’d like to take a look at why your church should have a website, if it doesn’t, and let you know about the service that we provide for churches to get a presence on the web.

The first reason that your church should have a website is so that people can find you.

It used to be that the place to put your ad was the paper or the yellow pages. And it’s true that these are not bad places to have your information. However, more people– myself included– use the Internet to find churches in an area, find information (like a phone number) on the church, and find directions for the church.

If you want those who are new in the area or have the same beliefs that you have to find your church easily, then you will want to have information about who you are in a place that they can find.

Think, for a moment, about how many churches of your denomination are in a given area. Think about the differences in beliefs, tastes in worship, and other discriminating factors. Think about the different services you church itself might offer– contemporary vs. traditional service is one thing that comes to mind. Now, if you’re new to the area, wouldn’t you like to have one place that you could find information about what a given church believes?

With a few simple pages on the Internet you can direct someone on how to get to your church, when your services are and what style, your doctrinal position (more on this later), and even show a picture of the church.

If you want them to come, then you need to make it easy for them to find you.

We’re dedicated to helping you get a low cost, low maintenance web presence where you church can information on the web.

Please bear with us as we are just getting started in this endeavor.

Coming up in the next few days we will be showing you some sites that we’ve done and giving you some sites we’re working on. We’ll also discuss some of the different things we have to do in order to get these sites up and running, grow our business, etc.

Thanks for coming by, and we look forward to sharing this journey with you.