5 ideas to improve the church website

The church website is arguably a necessity for every church.  Certainly in the developed world it’s a necessity.  The church website is often the place people new to an area will start their search for a church.  Making your church website an interesting place to visit should be a top priority.  In this blog post I’ll suggest 5 things you can do.  Just five that will improve the church website – your church website. A website offers:

• Immediate dissemination of information
• Better interaction with church members
• An information portal for the church members
• Private areas to distribute sensitive information
• A well known and trusted way to reach out to potential new members

These features of a church site are the foundations.  However like many church buildings these features aren’t looked after.  Many of the church websites have pages that have fallen by the wayside.  Like a church building that’s not been looked after the pages haven’t been attended to for years!

I want to help avoid church sites falling into disrepute.  If you look around this site you’ll find lots of ideas about church websites and what can help make them work.  You don’t have to buy anything from us.  You can simply read our ideas and implement them yourself.  In fact we offer free advice with no catches.  You really can phone up and ask us how to build an effective menu page or how to achieve some of the effects shown in this site.

I want to avoid finding church sites that are forlorn.  If this makes you think of your site why not try one of the five following ideas to give an instant pick up:

Change the banner.  It’s at the top of the page and generally on every page.  It is the branding that your church has chosen.  It’s the thing everyone sees so changing it immediately gives the feel of a new website.  It’s a fast way to make everyone feel the website is taking on a new lease of life!

Add content.  Content is king on the web.  People come to websites to read and view content.  Whilst pictures are nice in general people want text and lots of it.   They want to read about your church what’s going on and who’s doing it.  Why not ask each of the deacons or elders or church officers to write you 300 words – just 300!

Write a series.  Since content is king why not add a series about a certain part in the bible.  Often this simply means transferring the sermon into a series of web pages.  I’m sure your church will have done a series on Acts or Romans or similar.

Add a audio sermon.  Why not record your sermon and make it available as an MP3 file.  This isn’t difficult.  I know of churches that simply have a tape recorder at the front and they tape what’s being said.  No fancy sound system or computers just a good old fashion tape recorder.  It’s simple quick and add a new breadth to your site.

Add some slides.  Often you’ll find that the person leading the service will use a PowerPoint presentation so why not simply add it to the church website?  Why not add it beside the audio of the sermon?  You’ll suddenly have a media rich site.

These five ideas don’t require much work and are straightforward to implement.  All it needs is a bit of time and effort on the part of someone in the church.  Implementing them should take no more than 1 hour a week from someone in the church, not a lot of the potential reward for the church family!