Church was the original social marketing complete with blogs, events and groups but a lot of small communities are finding it hard to make the transition from sticky notes on a bulletin board to the modern world of web based community building.
I’ve written this article with smaller churches in mind, as well as community groups and centers who find it difficult to hire the web expertise required to run a successful online community. This tutorial is aimed squarely at small churches across the country who want to offer their members an online presence but want to ensure it’s done cost effectively. A few days back I posted an article called Can you put up a website for less than $100? that got a lot of attention, this piece is more about how to help small community churches and non profits.
How to get started
To get started, there are a couple of things that you’re going to need. First, you’ll need a website address and secondly you’ll need a place to host it. Hosting is a little like renting space for your church and a website address is just like the civil address your mail comes to, it’s there to help people find you.
Your website address can also be called a domain name and to get started, you’ll need to decide if you want to run your website with absolutely no costs or if you can afford $7 per year for your address. If you’d like to register your own website address, you can do so at BlueHost.com for $6.95 per year, with or without hosting. The other option is to use a free service such as http://wordpress.com/ where you can build and host your church website for free. Remember, if you choose to host your site for free at http://wordpress.com/, your website address will be something similar to http://yourchurchname.wordpress.com/ which is perfectly suitable for most small churches.
If you’ve elected to host your website with BlueHost.com or a similar hosting provider, you’ll need to install WordPress through their hosting support tool called Fantastico or by FTP’ing it to your web server. Once you’ve installed the tool, it’s time to make the site feel like your church.
WordPress and Themes
There are a number of attractive theme’s available for WordPress, each may be customized by a web developer to include your own church photos and name. Some that I have found while looking are:
What’s important to remember when it comes to WordPress is that you can make it look (and act) anyway you’d like. Simply make sure you pick a Theme that is right for you and somebody can always customize it later on. Also, keep in mind that a good design for a church is about people not the building. Your community wants to feel part of the site, just like they want to feel like part of the church.
Adding Content
When building content for your website keep in mind that every church should have some basic pages:
- A calendar with upcoming events and links to important church functions
- Office and sermon schedules, possibly even an outline of what you’ll be discussing
- An online contact form or email that is checked regularly
- Directions to the church, maybe even a link to Google Maps
- A way for people to get involved, feedback forms are a great idea
- Online donations, there are several cost effective ways to accept online payments
- Downloads and links to electronic versions of church materials. Did you know you can download the complete Bible to an iPhone?
- Subscription features such as an email newsletter or RSS feeds
- Free content, updated regularly
If you’re hoping to squeeze a few extra pennies out of the budget, you can host for free with the right partner. While not contact me? If you’re a church or community group, I’d be able to help you find free hosting in return for a link back to my site.
How would you improve a church website? What features would you like to see?
