Resources
So, now you need a website?
Andy Moyle throws some light onto the mysterious world of building a website.
Getting a website for your church plant is just one of many ways to publicise your plant and gain contacts. In my first church plant in 2001, 10% of first time visitors first heard of us through a website. Second time round, one of our core team heard of us through our website. Now, everyone who walks through the door has looked at the website before coming at some stage in the decision making process to visit. That said many planters rely too much on web presence! More people came in both plants through leafleting, banners and being invited personally.
Who?
There are five different ways people join plants – core team, just moved to the area, moving Church, lost to the Church (prodigal Christians) and not yet Christians. A web presence can help gather all of those. Most of the core team will come because you ask them, but you may gain some students and pioneering types in the pre-launch days. Once you have a Sunday gathering, we found that everyone who has just moved to the area, found us because of our website.
The target group of the website is therefore pretty diverse. You need to communicate vision, values and what you are doing in a way that is clear and jargon free. Christians and non-Christians need to be able to understand it. You also need to write content in such away that the search engines will rank it highly for the people looking for you – more on that later…
How?
There are two basic types of site – Static & Dynamic.
- A static site is pretty basic and communicates the essentials in a way that doesn’t go out of date, because it isn’t updated every often. In the early days – this can be a great way – it’s cheap and easy to do and you can spend time doing the important things like talking to people! The disadvantage is that search engines put sites with frequently changing content higher in their lists.
- A dynamic site is one that is frequently updated – once you are about to launch this can be ideal and helps to bring return visitors – you can upload sermons, have a calendar and password protected address list. Return visitors are in the main people that have already joined. If you go dynamic – keep it up to date. There is nothing worse on the web than a website advertising last year’s Christmas carol service. The issue to consider is Time & Cost vs Impact.
A website has two main parts to it:
The design and the content. The design is the look and the content is your text, uploaded images, mp3s and videos. A good website design will have a simple to use back-end for changing the content – where you don’t need any technical expertise. Our current church plant website uses Wordpress which is a simple to use “content management system” mainly used by bloggers. We had someone who was able to tweak the design look and then content can be added simply. Wordpress is free, as are some Church related plugins like sermon browser and a Church directory.
A domain name like www.thegatewaychurch.info typically costs under £10 a year and hosting that will allow lots of sermons to be uploaded is around £100 a year. Many church plants use professional agencies like http://www.churchedit.co.uk/church-planting-websites , www.churchinsight.com , or www.hypermouse.co.uk
Communicate the right things
Vision & values – are caught from the look as much as communicated by the words. A corporate looking website makes the Church look cold, whereas an overly complicated or confusing site could make the church look unorganised. So make sure you have pictures of people having fun!
Make sure your web designer makes the site work in all browsers – one recent church site wouldn’t let the now very out of date Internet Explorer 6 users visit at all– that would be 17.6% of visitors to our site!
When & where – people need to know what you do, when and where. When possible, try to include full addresses and even a local map detailing landmarks and public transport routes. The easier it is to find you the better!
Contact – they need to be able to get in touch through a contact form, email link and mobile number.
Make the site findable!
Visitors will find your site because they know the web address or they find it in a search engine. What would you type in Google to find a church in your area? I would start by typing “Church town name”. If too many hits came, I would try “charismatic church town-name”. Those are then your keywords. You then write the content to be what users need from “communicating the right things” and with those keywords repeated to get you higher for those search terms. The aim is to get yourself as far up page 1 of the search results as possible.
This what we wrote for www.thebridgechurch.co.uk which is consistently #2 for “Church st ives”
“The Bridge Church is a lively and friendly Newfrontiers Church based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire.
We gather together in small groups in Huntingdon, St Ives and Godmanchester midweek for worship, fellowship and outreach and on Sundays 10.30am at Westfield Primary School in St Ives.
We would love to have you join with us one Sunday or midweek. If you don’t normally go to Church, you will find us welcoming, friendly and lively. We hope you will experience the love and presence of God during our meetings and learn more about His plan for our lives through Bible based relevant teaching and ministry.”
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about getting your site high up the search engine rankings. It is quite an art and there are thousands of websites telling you how and quite a few firms charging a lot of money to help you too!.
If you don’t have time to research Search engine optimisation, here are six top tips for the busy church planter…
1. Buy a proper Domain Name - no one remembers long names. Most www.churchname.com will have been snapped up long ago - so why not go for www.churchname-townname.com which will help with your search engine ranking. Make sure it contains the town name and the word church!
2. Make sure the title tag for each page is set “Church Name – Townname – Page name”
3. Make sure your first page has your main key words in it, but is still snappy to read.
4. Don’t bother with tricks to get listed higher, like your keywords written invisibly using the background colour over and over again – they will get you blacklisted from search engines.
5. Make sure images have alternate text “Church name – event description”
6. Regularly update the front page slightly – we have a sentence describing the coming Sunday that is changed every week. Google likes sites that are updated regularly
7. Get other churches and websites to link to you – especially ones that rank higher for your keywords.
8. Cheat with Google Adwords. It allows you to advertise with chosen keywords like “Church Town-name”. Searches with those keywords bring you up on the right hand side or even top of the first page in the sponsored link section. It works on a bid system and charges by hits – thankfully church and town-name usually work out 5-10p per click. The adverts are shown more frequently depending on your budget – for a medium size town, set the budget at the minimum £30 per month – we have never paid more than £3 a month though. Bigger cities will cost a lot more, because a lot more people will be competing for your keywords.
Comments