Comments on: How to make a website for your church with a minimal amount of effort

By: Mean Dean

Mean Dean — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:00:38 +0000

Photo of a church?! Why, so we can worship bricks-n-mortar?

Seriously, if you’re worried about people knowing what the church will look like, put the pix on the directions page along with a google map, written directions, days and times of services in a way that it can be printed onto a single piece-o-paper or quickly absorbed via a mobile device

Instead, on the front page, smiling faces of the potential fellowship one is missing by not getting their posterior in your pews

By: mark

mark — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:27:59 +0000

You can also use fre website making tool such as Weebly or ClutterMe Mark from ClutterMe

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:22:08 +0000

Timothy,

The great thing about Wordpress is that it has pages (hierarchical) as well as blog posts (chronological). There is no difficulty in uploading any sort of file type either. I mention it as an ideal option for those who do not have the expertise to set a website up from scratch.

By: Timothy Fish

Timothy Fish — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:09:51 +0000

Creating a website does not need to be complicated, but I am of the opinion that a church needs more for a website than just a blog. Including a blog on the church website can be a good thing, but a church needs other things as well. Blogs have become a very important part of the web, but they present from problems that I believe should be avoided with a church website.

Blogs, by their nature, are constanly going out of date. If there is not someone to update the blog on a daily basis then it starts to look stale. If a person is looking for a church, the last thing he wants to find is a blog on which the last thing posted was from Christmas or Easter. He wants to know that the church behind the website is alive.

Some blog sites do not allow some types of information to be posted. Photos and embedded video might be included, but a PDF file or an audio file may be difficult. When the church has control of a site on a server, the options are much less limited.

There is some information that will seldom change on a church website. People who need this information will want to find this information without searching through several blog posts.

Timothy Fish – author Church Website Design: A step by step approach

By: links for 2007-08-14 « Social Life of Suburban Spaces

links for 2007-08-14 « Social Life of Suburban Spaces — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:57:42 +0000

[...] How to make a website for your church with a minimal amount of effort (tags: christian webdesign community) [...]

By: Nicola

Nicola — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:50:59 +0000

See also Church Marketing Sucks for all kinds of excellent web & related stuff for churches.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 10:39:32 +0000

Thanks for comments. I agree that a photo of the church, location information and service times should all be immediately obvious.

In this instance I’m assuming the photo is in the header picture, but otherwise adding one to a ‘page’ should be easy enough – you can upload pictures into posts and pages. It would be possible to put one in the sidebar too – but not quite as easy as putting it into a page or post.

I have added location details into the first sidebar text box and put a new text box for service times. As Clare says it is probably important enough to be on the front page as that is what most people will want to know.

Mild annoyance about the text box widgets in this theme – they don’t put line breaks in.

By: Clare

Clare — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 10:07:35 +0000

Webistes???? Is that French for website then? Oops, sorry.

By: Clare

Clare — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 10:06:56 +0000

Fabulous. Though life would be much easier if all church websites clearly put the address/location of their church and the service times on the front page of their webistes rather than hiding them under a click or two.

In fact the number of churches that don’t state where they are on their webistes – at least not anywhere obvious on their websites – is amazing. Though I guess in a small village the name of the church and village St Whatnott, Little Muchton-under-Lyme is all the address you need.

By: How to get your own website « Matt and Polly’s blog website

How to get your own website « Matt and Polly’s blog website — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:45:38 +0000

[...] 13 August, 2007 I’ve been thinking of writing a post about how to set-up your own WordPress.com website for a while (that is the software and hosting we use for this site) – it is so easy, free and whilst being simple also has some fairly advanced stuff too. It is also Opensource which makes it even better in my view. However, I no longer need to write a post about it as Dave Walker has – more specifically he explains how to set up a church website, but it’d work for a personal blog, family website or any website! Here is the guide and here is the example ‘church website’. [...]