In this article, we are going to be taking a look into launching your church or ministry website.
It is important to know that if you expect to expand your outreach capabilities, you almost are going to require an online presence via a church or ministry website.
All you have to do is look around and see nearly everyone looking at their cell phones to perform a variety of tasks. If I can stress anything enough to those who are either thinking of launching a new church or ministry website or looking into having their existing online presence re-designed, you are going to want to make sure that your web developer knows how to develop and design for the mobile web first.
When launching your church or ministry website there are few things that you should be prepared for to ensure a smooth overall process of getting your new website up and running effortlessly.
Needless to say in order to have an online presence there are a few obvious items that you are going to need to ensure that you have in place prior to beginning talking with a web developer.
First, you are going to ensure that you have a domain name and hosting set up to have your ministry website viewable on.
Secondly, have in mind exactly what the needs of your website will be. Will you have contact forms for various elements of your ministry, will you have the need to have multiple authors on your website to provide ongoing content, and how soon are you need the site completed by. While I am on the topic of timeframes, it is important to be realistic based on the scope of your design and how quickly you can provide your web developer any materials that he/she may need.
Third, do you have the images that you are going to use across your website? If you haven’t noticed if you are on any social networking site, images speak louder than words and are oftentimes what draws a visitor into clicking on a link. If you are using images of individuals from your church, especially children, it is essential to have the necessary release forms in place releasing authorization to use those images on your website.
Lastly, let’s talk about content. So what is content? Believe it or not, many people do not know what it means when a web developer is referring to content. In the short of things, it is the very wording that will appear on your pages. If you do not, you will certainly want to make sure that the individual you are dealing with has experience in developing church or ministry websites.
Obviously, as many of you may or may not know, there are several CMS platforms in which you can develop an amazing website upon. You can choose my preferred method, which is using WordPress to have your ministry website developed around. While many may choose to take the “do-it-yourself” route, I want to discourage this.
There is more that actually goes into a website design other than just the images and wording that appears on it. There are such things as page speed optimization, search engine optimization, updates to plugins and themes and other related areas where hiring a seasoned web developer will certainly play into your advantage.
Something else to keep in mind is that depending upon the scope of the website, there is a lot of time that goes into the developing and designing of your website. Even if you are merely re-designing, things can become daunting at best. Please make sure that you have a budget set forth and be realistic with what your developer may provide to you for a quote of the project.
It isn’t uncommon for churches not to have the quality images that may work best for a website. However, do not rely upon using images from Google to use upon your website. You are opening a plethora of unwanted heartache in enduring possible lawsuits for copyright infringements.
There are plenty of places that offer amazing quality hi-resolution photo’s that you can use without any worries about being in violation of any copyright or trademark issues.
There are amazing photo websites such as UnSplash Photography, Pexels, and Pixabay. You can Google any of these and locate the links for them.
However, I prefer to use UnSplash as they have a method of being able to search for them within your media library directly from your website and then attaching them as the featured photo for a post, or using them upon any page that they may work with.
With podcasting becoming a very popular way for people to be able to listen to your morning or evening worship services, you will want to establish a way to host your audio with a company that is designed to handle the volume and file sizes. Most hosting companies, such as ours provide you with a limited amount of web space to upload your files that are related to your website.
Believe me, if you are doing at least one audio file a week that is between 30-45 mins in length, it will not take long before you are finding yourself running low on available storage space on your server. Not to mention that if people are listening to your audio streams directly from your website, it does put a significant draw on your bandwidth resources.
You may want to look into using a great company, such as Blubrry, since they have a plugin that you can use on a WordPress based website that will enable you to upload your audio sermons directly from your website to their servers without having to store it on your own server.
If you are recording video of your services, it only makes sense to create a YouTube channel for those videos if you don’t already have one. YouTube has become as powerful in the realm of search as Google itself.
You will certainly want to develop a brand for your church or ministry website. Everything from logos, colors, fonts, etc. Also, make sure that you carry over that branding to your social networking accounts and make sure that they are connected to your ministry website so that when new content is released, it is funneled directly to your various social networks.
Yes, I did. Let’s dig into this topic a bit deeper. Besides the obvious content such as a blog article like you are reading, there are other creative ways that you can deliver content that your users will find both valuable and find useful and are willing to share with their friends and family across various social networking sites.
In today’s times, most every pastor I have come across has access to a smartphone. If you are using Facebook, you can do a Facebook Live video and have it to where it connects directly to your website. Another alternative is to do a YouTube Live video. While that may sound difficult, it’s easier than you might think.
If you have a Gmail account, all you have to do is visit YouTube and login with your credentials and get started. When you pull up YouTube on your phone and signed in, you will see a camera at the top of your screen. Click on it and you are instantly live and shooting a video.
I recommend that you keep them short. Maybe just provide a little encouragement for the day, or provide an update to an upcoming series that you may be working on presenting.
After you have completed your video, you can then grab the link to it and dump it into a blog post and it is smart enough to embed the video player to for your video without you having to worry about any special coding. It truly is that simple. Check out the video below that I am including and all I did is place the link to it in this blog post.
It really is that simple. Of course on this website, I am using an amazing editor called “Gutenberg” which has various blocks that you can use to truly bing your blog post to life.
With the world we live in now, there has never been a better time to have an online presence. What an amazing way to reach more people than you can even begin to imagine.
I realize that getting busy with launching a church or ministry website or re-designing an existing website can be daunting at the very least. I want to help make it easy for you to understand.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment on this post and I will be more than glad to answer them for you. I have over 15 years in the web development and design industry and will be more than willing to help you gain a better understanding of what goes on in the process of getting an awesome website up and running.
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