What are Church Sites around the web doing?

Are you an owner of one of the Church sites that are on the web?  Are you proud of what you have?  Are you relevant to today’s youth?  When did you last update the site?

I’m not being difficult but I really care about church sites.  I don’t want to make you feel bad if you haven’t done much, I fully understand.  It’s hard to keep up the pace.  But perhaps it’s now time to look at reinvigorating your site.  Dust off the cobwebs and clean up and add to the content.

It’s always hard to get into a rhythm about church sites and getting the updates done but it really does help.  If you plan out what you’re going to do and how often you’re going to do it.

Start by figuring out the who.  Perhaps it’s only you or maybe you’ve managed to co-opt a few people into helping out. However many people and the amount of effort they can put in will really define the amount of work that you can do.

Church sites need updating so now you’ve found a few people you should agree with them what is a realistic amount of time for each of them to give to the updates.  I’d then suggest halving that time and using that as a basis for planning.  It doesn’t matter if you update, hourly, weekly or daily, just update and keep the regularity going.  It’s better to update once a week than to update in a burst and then stop and then a burst and then stop etc.

The following is a list of nine things that I found over many church sites can make a difference.  I’m sure you can’t do them all instead pick one or two and go from there.  Start slow and build momentum!

1. Change the colour scheme
2. Add in a new menu item
3. Create a blog (but only if you can update at least once a week)
4. Add some photos (people love seeing what’s going on)
5. Add video (again people love seeing what’s happening)
6. Create an online poll and use it to get email addresses that you can stay in contact with
7. Add a Facebook like button
8. Add a Facebook feed into the site
9. Create a login section for members and fill it with useful information like contact names and numbers

None of these needs to take up a lot of time.  Most of them can be achieved in one or two hours a week and with some ongoing work over a few months will help you on your way to building a one of the better church sites on the web.

As always if you’d like any free advice just drop us a note using the contact us form and we’ll happily get back to you.  Most thing we can help with pretty quickly.

And incidentally if you’ve other ideas that you think we should add to the above list let us know and we’ll look into adding them to the list.  It’s always good to build up lists with real world examples.