Are you thinking of building a web site for your church? I'm the webmaster for Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, IN. We get between 700 and 1000 visitors each day. I've learned a few things about building a church website along the way.
Why?
Many websites about building church websites focus on creating a welcoming site in order to increase church membership. In my opinion a church website should be about sharing your message. That doesn't mean you should ignore good web design principles. Your site should be easy to read, your pages should load quickly, and your navigation should be easy to understand. Information aimed at visitors and new members should be kept up-to-date. List your service times, but if you have a winter and a summer schedule either list both schedules or make sure that the site is updated when the season changes.
Content
- The real work of creating a successful church website is generating content. It is work, and no one wants to do it. The Redeemer site is successful because between the blog and the sermon database, getting content is not a problem. Occasionally I get pictures to upload, and occasionally I ask for something, but in general new content appears on a regular basis.
- One way to do well in search engines it to provide the spiders with a steady stream of new content.
- Begging people for content gets real old, real fast. If you don't know where your new content is going to come from, consider a brochure style website. This type of site may do well in search results in smaller towns where a search on "church your town" isn't going to produce hundreds of results.
Domain Name and Hosting
If you are creating a new site do not host your church website at your isp unless your isp will let you use your own domain name. Urls like http://home.big.provider.net/~yourchurch/ are hard to remember, hard to share with other people, hard to type, and they look funny on your literature. Domain names are cheap and so is hosting. Its much easier to start out with a real domain name than to try to change everything later.
Do not ever, purchase your domain name through your hosting provider. Hosting provider are a dime a dozen. If little Billy's dad will front him a few hundred dollars, he can put a server in his closet and start a hosting company. The problem is that next fall when Billy goes back to school or next spring when he goes on spring break and his server goes down for a couple of weeks you will need to move to a new hosting provider. Unless of course you bought your domain name from Billy. In which case you will not be able to change the nameservers for your domain, so you will not be able to move to a new hosting company. You will be able to set up your site at a new host without any problems. But all links to your site from other sites, all bookmarks to your site in your visitors' browsers, all links to your pages in google will be dead. If Billy decides he's tired of having a hosting company, the only way you can regain control of your domain name is to wait for it to expire, then buy it again. This does happen.
Many hosting provider offer free domains with the purchase of a hosting package. Do not be tempted. In addition to hosting providers who disappear, some companies make it difficult to move your domain name to a registrar. Some register your domain name as their own and will not give it up when you try to leave. If you sign on with a host and then find out his service is unacceptable, but he controls your domain name you are stuck. Domain names are less than $10.00/ year at GoDaddy. Its not worth messing around with a cutrate provider.
I've received stellar customer service from GoDaddy. In fact, this is the one exception to the rule. I would not hesitate to buy both a domain name and hosting service from godaddy. YMMV.
Tools
Determine what tools you are going to use to build your website. I use NoteTab Light. If you are not technical, you are probably going to use a web page generator or a content management system to build your site. I used Front Page for about 15 minutes, but it kept changing my markup, so I went back to coding by hand. I don't mind when a program makes suggestions, but its annoying when they insist on getting their own way.
I am not opposed to Front Page, Dreamweaver or the like. They provide a quick and easy way for non-technical users to build a good-looking web page. Its been several years since I used a page generator, so the concerns I had them may not be applicable now. Here are some things to watch out for.
- Generators tend to make very heavy pages. The file sizes of Front Page site that I converted were, on average, a full 50% smaller after the conversion was complete. Smaller file sizes mean shorter load times.
- Generator usually use tables for layout. I have found sites that use tables for layout difficult to maintain.
- Front Page seems to want to use images for titles. The most important visitor to your site is the googlebot, and he cannot read images. Make sure you are using for text for your titles, so the bot will know what its about.
- Web page generators are notorious for creating pages that are difficult for handicapped people to access. While I don't believe that everyone has a right to be able to use every feature on every web page, I also think its kind of silly to make it difficult for any one to use a site.
- I converted one site from a typical Front Page site to a lighter, more bot friendly site. It position on google went from somewhere on page 6 to the number 3 slot on page one in three months, and is now in the number one slot on google for the search terms we care about. This was accomplished by slimming down the markup, making sure the name of the organization appeared on every page, getting rid of images in the h1 tag, and slightly reorganizing the content.
As your website grows, you may become frustrated with the limitations of using a page generator. HTML Dog provides some excellent tutorials for learning to code your pages "by hand". There are lots of tutorials out there, but, in my opion, these are some of the best. Even if you plan to use a page generator, it is a good idea to have a basic grasp of html and css.
Organize your content
In my opinion it is best to make your top level menus pretty broad. Redeemer's top level menu is too long right now. It would have been better if I had started with broader categories, each leading to a page linking to more specific pages. Think now about features you will want to add down the road. It will be easier to plan your menu structure now than to change it on a site that is already established. User's always want more features. They are almost always right. But they don't like it when you change move things around so they can't find them. Sort of like when your favorite grocery store does a major remodel. Things may look a lot better, but its annoying to have to wander around hunting for stuff you buy all the time
