Your Church Website.

Does your church have a website?

OnlineChristian evangelism has now become one of themajor areas of Christian growth.


Planning your new Website

One of your first jobs will be to decide your objectives, and this should follow a great deal of prayer.

You will be wondering what you wish to tell visitors about God, about Jesus Christ, about the Bible, about your church, the services and the full range of other facilities you provide.
Will your new website be geared to evangelising nationally, even internationally, or will you concentrate on your local catchment area.

Ask the Lord to show you His will as His servant and, in particular, His will in the proposed enterprise. It’s a good idea to commit your first initial thoughts to paper to use later, cover as wide a range as possible.
Have a good think about your vision and, of course, pray about it before inviting those around you in the church to become involved.

Arrange meetings with church elders/leaders and anyone interested, particularly those with I.T. knowledge and abilities. Have an open discussion on everything you’ve written down,
i.e. should your new website be geared to evangelising nationally, even internationally, or would it be best to concentrate on your local catchment area? Your decision here would influence the contents of your website and also your marketing.
 

You should form a smallish group to help decide what, where, how, when and who.

Look at other church websites and try to get the feel of what they’re trying to say and to achieve.

Discover your, or really the Lord’s objectives for the website. Let His word be a lamp unto your feet!
If it seems daunting, remember...
’Ask and you shall receive!’

Once you have agreed the objectives, it’s time to plan in a little more detail.

Who will be your target market?

Where are these people?

How will you attract them to your website and the likely cost of this marketing?

What will you say to them?

How will you say it?

Consider, web design, number of pages you will need, size of typeface, colours, pictures and links to other websites.

What is your budget for the initial and then the ongoing expenditure of this project?

How much will it all cost?

How will you raise the money?

Who will do the various jobs?

Three main methods of building a new website are...

1)

The cheapest in money values is to let a member of your church, who knows what is involved and enjoys using computers, build the website and go on to maintain it.
Benefit: low cost. Almost nil start up costs
except Domain Name c3-9 British Pounds per annum
Hosting, £2 a month for a small website - £15/month for a good size business site.

Possible problems:
The website may not be as good as you envisaged
Arguments regarding any of a host of necessary decisions could spoil the atmosphere and could arouse resentment, causing some to ‘give up’ on a project with which they don’t feel identified.
Who knows when the web designer might leave the church and you’d have no one to maintain the website or even to publish changes in dates and detail that would regularly be needed.

2)

Purchase a self-build website from a company that will host your site. (Three examples have been selected)

Example one

A well known Christian hosting/self build company is
OurChurch.com Website Hosting

OurChurch.com claim to be easy, safe and affordable: A Christian website hosting company. Providing reliable, friendly sites, safe from offensive ads since 1966, and they invite you to build a free website in order to evaluate the ease of their system.
You can view a portfolio of church, ministry and ecommerce sites and a free consultation with their web designers.

Costs

Package                        Free        Domain          Bronze           Silver             Gold       Platinum
Set-up fee              free      free            free           free          free        free
Monthly cost          free      $5              $12.42       $16.58     $24.92   $37.42
Domain Name
Domain name          include  included     included     included    included  included
Domain registration
fee paid by OCC -     yes       yes             yes             yes            yes          yes
Website Builder
NE1™ Web Builder    yes       yes             yes             yes            yes          yes
NE1™ page limit:      12       unlimited   unlimited    unlimited   unlimited unlimited

There are many, many more items in the list, as you can see if you go to the OurChurch website, but in this instance we scrolled down to Payment terms

Payment Options In USA Dollars
Quarterly                                                                 60            90          135             
Semi-annually     -                                
90              120          180         270

Annually
(2 months free)                     
60           149             199          299         449

Optional add-ons

Ad-Free Site: Extra 8.25 per month


Bundle price
You save between 39 up to 359 US Dollars by purchasing a bundle

Before making a decision It's essential to investigate the supplier and ensure that the system chosen does what you want it to do and is within your budget.
(Prices correct on 6th October 2008)

Link: http://www.ourchurch.com/



Example two

1and1.co.uk

We, at ChristianInformation.co.uk are using 1&1 for both web building and hosting. We think highly of this company, their products and their help facilities. We’re not experts in these matters and are simply telling you how we find 1and1.
Both Norma and I had absolutely no knowledge of the internet,
at the time we decided to build ChristianInformation.co.uk. and we were totally without knowledge of HTML and programming.
We still have virtually no knowledge of HTML or programming and don't need it with 1and1.

(Just as a matter of interest: We’d been undecided whether God really wanted us to do a Christian Information website and in April 2006 I asked God if He’d please give us some kind of sign.
A day or so later five of us had a 3 days sightseeing tour in London. On the last night, as I walked into the hotel with Norma there was litter blowing about and I picked up a dirty section of a newspaper from under my feet and took it inside to chuck it into the bin. As I screwed it up I noticed an advertisement from Car Phone Warehouse offering FREE Broadband. It was the first time that anyone of us had heard of FREE Broadband.
We took that as a sign and as soon as we arrived home we up-rated from ‘pay as you go’ to Broadband and began researching all we needed to build the website.)

Costs with 1and1 are £3 British pounds P.A. for a co.uk domain
Up to £9 P.A. for a dot com domain.
Hosting starts at £4 a month and the hosting package we are using costs c£10 monthly. The package includes £400 of free software.
1and1 also offer an easy web building facility called ‘Website Builder’ at £5 a month extra: we used Website Builder to build this website.
LINK to 1and1.co.uk


  
Example three

GO DADDY.com

Godaddy.com seems to be a good host/self build company. We haven’t used Go Daddy but it has a good reputation for low prices, combined with reliability.
 

Costs in US Dollars
Domains: $1.99 to $19.99

Hosting:
$4.74 to $14.24 per month

Some web building is free, or as part of a bundle that includes hosting sold at prices similar to just the hosting price.

You will really need to link to the above web build/hosting companies in order to get the feel of them and to match the various features they offer with your specific needs.

As stated when considering the first option: ‘Who knows when the web designer might leave the church and you’d have no one to maintain the website or even to publish changes in dates and detail that would regularly be needed.’
The problem would not be eradicated, but the 3 companies listed above have telephone help facilities and would be able to guide your new web administrator to change and edit the pages: and then republish, thus ensuring continuality of your website
Link to godaddy.com

3)

Use a professional web design company


This option should result in the best and most professional looking website that is exactly to the specifications you agreed with web designer. The designer would also guide you in many areas, such as features that look good, but take too long to download: But, providing you have the money this is by far the best option.
However, the initial cost would be much higher approximately £4000 to £12,000 and above.
This would probably be prohibitive to the vast majority of churches that, even if they had sufficient funds, would probably prefer to use the extra cash in other church activities.

Marketing your new website


No matter how good your website is, no matter how many pictures and impressive cascades you display and no matter much you spend on advertising.

IF PEOPLE DON’T VISIT YOUR SITE IT WILL NOT BE OF MUCH USE TO ANYONE

It is beyond the scope of these pages to get deeply into the massive subject of marketing; however we do offer some pointers to help you get off to a good start.

Starting with Search engines.
With search engines the content of your site is king!
But Description and keywords are also vital to your success
.
Your host company will be able to advise the number of words allowed and how to present them. It would be a good idea to ask God to help you make the right decisions.

Description of your website to submit to search engines
You only need submit a short description. Look at the website title and at the content. Then ensure that the description exactly quotes the main content items by name.

Keywords
Ensure all the keywords you select match the words in the description and also match those in the site content. The main key words for a Christian website would probably include...God, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Bible: (Providing, of course, that these words are part of your content and are also in the description.)
Some people include some keywords words that are easily misspelled: example...Hymns, hims, hyms. But search engines limit the number of keywords you can submit so it’s best to include all the real words before getting involved with misspellings.

Letting people know about your new website
Ask every church member to email everyone in their contact list telling of your NEW website and quoting some of the main headings. Ask everyone to forward your email to all their contacts.

Contact the leaders of other churches in your
marketing area and ask them to let their members know about your site.

Have handbills/posters made. Display them on your notice boards inside and outside your church. And ask all members of your church, particularly the youth to place them in local shops and at their places of work.

Send posters to every local club, Round Table, Women’s Institute, Young Wives, dancing classes, keep fit establishments, wedding shops and hotels, etc.

Include your website address on every piece of church notepaper and include details in your church newsletters, inviting comments from the readers.

All your evangelists could give handbills to everyone they talk to.

Write to the features editor, or religious correspondent of all the local newspapers. (To National papers if you’re marketing to a wide area.) Enclose a good description of your site specifying items that you think would benefit them and/or their readers, send a short letter outlining your objectives in launching the new website and giving a contact name/s and address.

You could also inform your Bishop and Dean asking for their help in promoting your new website and inviting comment.

You might also ask other churches if they will exchange links with you.

So far all of the above has involved you in hardly any Marketing costs.
So now you may wish to try paid advertising. Perhaps you

could start with your local parish magazines.
A couple of local newspapers might be fruitful. You might have your handbills distributed inside newspapers. but be careful with paid advertising. You could easily spend far too much money for only a minimal return. We advise you to move slowly with any paid advertising.
Finally you should not send bulk emails to anyone you don’t know, unless they have ‘opted in’ as you could annoy them and be reported for spam. Your reputation would then be likely to suffer.

If you've read this far you must be quite interested and we wish you well in your efforts to spread the word about Jesus Christ.

Brian and Norma