The Basics Of Church Websites
Your churches website is so important, Mark Kelsey (C3 Oxford Falls) refers to the website as the new front door of your church. People will be looking at your website, quietly judging, assessing, finding out information & getting a feel for your culture. It's important that your website feels refreshing, exciting & matches the culture of your church. Make sure the design matches the culture / feeling of your church. You will be communicating to people how you want them to react to your service through your website.
So how do I do that?
1. Write down what you want to see
Be specific about the kinds of information you want to communicate, use adjectives to represent your church. You are preaching culture - so preach! Figure out the kinds of imagery you want to use i.e beach images, black and white, vibrant, dry, wet etc. Then communicate that to your team who will be helping you build.
2. Get Squarespace / Wordpress
You need what's called a Content Management System (CMS). It will house all of your information, it will submit it to the internet and give you a place you can manage your site. For a long time I have used Wordpress and been relatively happy with it, but recently I moved to squarespace and I cannot speak more highly of the product.
They have great support, you can steal the C3NC template & copy as much as you want to get your website happening!
3. Test / Update
Once your website is live you must evaluate it's success and continually update it. Google will be looking for relevant updated data so making sure you or someone in your team is updating your site.
Our main pages
Events page - designed for our church to know what is coming up
Sundays - communicate Sunday culture / invite people to services
Welcome - for new people, up first we want to tell them who our senior pastors are, service times, videos & interactive content to make sure they are drawn in.
This may not be all you need but getting a strong, mobile friendly, brilliant website is a priority so if you can't do it contact us and we can get you in touch with someone who can!