So you’re thinking of taking on the D.I.Y. Church Website Design project, or maybe you have been selected to be the team lead on such a project. There are somethings that you are going to need to have in place to ensure this goes off without too many complications.
It has to be the very pinnacle point of where everything starts. You absolutely must have a domain name in order to even begin to establish your online presence. It’s the www.yourdomainname.com aspect. While there are several hosting providers who will suggest they can register your domain name for you, don’t break the mold.
If you’re looking for one of the top domain name providers around the globe, then GoDaddy is your turn to solution for setting up your domain name. They make it absolutely easy to get up and running when it comes to setting up your domain name. Keep in mind, though, this is the only thing you want to do via GoDaddy. DO NOT host your website with them. Further information about that will be discussed further down in this article.
Okay, you’ve established your domain name. Now let’s talk a bit about where your website will be nested. Every church website has to be hosted somewhere and it’s where your domain name will point to so when people type it into their browser, it will bring up your site.
Let me begin by saying that all website hosting providers are not created equally, and certainly not when it comes to providing solid hosting environments for churches who are using WordPress to develop their online content. I realize many churches are on a tight budget when it comes to talk about a fixed annual bill for hosting a church website. However, cheap can lead you into a world of issues further down the road.
So who offers up rock-solid hosting for churches using WordPress? For most, I would recommend SiteGround as the beginning stage of your site’s development. They offer a plethora of tools as well as have a quick install application for getting your WordPress installation all set up and running. If you are going to go with them, look at their “Go Geek” plan. While it’s more costly than the others, for what it offers, I promise you that it will save you hours of headaches and issues further down the road.
If you’re really looking to rock it out with amazing server speeds as well as other built-in enhancements such as premium security offered by Sucuri and a blazing fast CDN, then you will want to jump on over to FlyWheel.
Everyone always wants the coolest designs available for churches today. However, having the right set of tools is of the utmost importance to ensuring you get the results you are looking for. There are a few things that you are going to need to get started with your D.I.Y. church website design project. So what are the item’s you are going to need?
First, you are going to need a theme and a pagebuilder, which will help you design your church website design that will deliver stunning results.
There are two that I recommend immediately and that I use as a professional developer and designer.
Divi is pretty encompassing. It has both the theme as well as the pagebuilder combined in one easy-to-use package. It jumps in at $89 annually for your license of this product, or if you are content you can opt-in for the lifetime license of $249 which provides you with continual updates and feature releases for as long as you continue to utilize their product.
The next amazing design tool and one that has pretty much become my personal “Go To” set of tools
Both of these pagebuilders offer amazing capabilities and features. However, for the church or ministry who is looking to ramp up both the design elements and features as well as endless customization possibilities, then I am going to push you to the Elementor Pro route in conjunction with the pro version of Page Builder Framework.
I am not going to geek out right now about the literally thousands of variations and custom creations that are possible using Elementor Pro, but I can assure you that for those of you who are a bit on the nerdy and techy side, such as myself, then this is going to be like being a kid entering into a candy store for the first time.
Yes, let’s do talk about your images that you are going to be using on your D.I.Y. Church Website Design. We all love and know how to use Google to find amazing images. But guess what? If you choose to download and use them on your church or ministry website design, you could find yourself ending up in a costly lawsuit over copyright infringement. DON’T DO IT.
There are plenty of websites that offer royalty-free graphics that you can utilize in your project. I would recommend using unsplash.com, pexels.com, or pixabay.com. Of course if you’re looking for niched down images that relate more to your ministry, there are plenty of resources available, however, you’re probably going to need a subscription to utilize their images and many of those are not on the cheap side, if I may add that in as a side note.
I can’t encourage you enough to use images from those who actually attend your church. That being said, let me caution you to make sure you have the necessary release forms that provide you the release necessary to use their images either in print, web, or other distribution methods.
Children in particular make for wonderful shots, especially when it comes to assisting you promoting your youth ministry. However, you don’t want little Jimmy’s mommy and daddy scraping your churches pocketbook for a lawsuit because they have not authorize you to use those images on the web.
With privacy being a huge issue, you want to ensure that you have all of your bases covered. It’s just like anything else in life, you’ll want to cover your six, if you will.
If there is one thing you will learn very quickly, this goes a little quicker if you have a complete team of people to assist you along your way of your D.I.Y Church Website Design. If this is your first time even trying something of this nature, you are going to find out fairly quickly that there is a lot of time involved and you’re going to have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get dirty with learning some new things.
That being said, YouTube is an incredible source for picking up easy-to-follow tutorials for those who are brave enough to take this route.
Both Divi and Elementor Pro have amazing communities and groups across Facebook. So if you need a little instruction, you can oftentimes find people within them who are always willing to lend a hand.
I cannot stress this enough. Before you begin any actual designing of your website, have a content map prepared and ready to go. What is a content map? It is basically the content of your website. How do you want it laid out as well as any related images that will be needed to support your content. It’s not a matter of just slapping it all together and hoping it works out visually at the end of the day.
Also, while planning your content map, be thinking about what extra levels of interactions will your church website design require. You know things like contact forms, sign-up forms, audio/video streaming and the list could go on for quite some time in this topic alone.
While I am touching on video and audio, let me assist you before you bog your web hosting provide down with files that they don’t want on their servers to begin with.
For video files, you really should be uploading them to YouTube. I mean, why not? After all, they are the second largest search engine in the world. Next, for those churches or ministries who may want to offer up a podcast for their members and visitors to be able to listen to. You will need a separate hosting provider just for audio. For that, I am going to recommend Libsyn.
You may be thinking to yourself about now, “wow, there is a lot that goes into this whole church website design thing!” You would absolutely be correct on that. However, it isn’t anything you can achieve. It’s a matter of doing it in the right order of your website build to ensure that each component comes into fruition at the exact right correct time.
During your course of taking on your D.I.Y Church Website Design project, you’re probably going to want to take a look at what other churches across the Internet are putting together. There are several websites that I can recommend to do this. Just Google “best church website designs.”
Begin looking through a few of those and see what various churches are doing to deliver their online content. You can gather some amazing inspiration and ideas.
At the end of the day, remember, it’s about communicating the Gospel Message. People are not looking for theology when they are coming to your website. They’re looking for information that is valuable to them in making a decision as to whether or not they are wanting to visit.
Hopefully this article has provide you with a little more detail and information if you are thinking about that D.I.Y. church website design project.
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