Church Websites

You know there was a thread about 1/2 a year ago about church websites and why some get used and some don't.
First, my personal opinion on church websites is to first define your purpose.(really any site) Without this, you are going to have the thoughts you do: how do I fill it with content. You probably need to ask yourself, who is going to be using the site and for what purpose? When you answer that, make that information easily accessibly.
Second, don't feel the need to have lots of stuff. Don't get grand ideas about the site. More than likely, your site will not be a http://www.desiringgod.org/ or a http://www.gty.org/. (not a slam on you or your church, it's just they have professionals who do it for them)
Finally, don't give up. If nothing else you will leave having learned something. I hope your site works for you guys.

A few thoughts about the site though. The things on the right don't make sense there, plus they are pretty big compared to the rest of the site. I would get rid of the search as your site probably will not be that big. If word press offers it, space your letters out in the heading, or change the font and make them a tad bit bigger.

You can PM if you want. I can help anywhere you need.

Here is a site that has helped me immensely. They offer technique and some code. http://www.alistapart.com/. Not sure how much it will help when dealing with word press though. I have never used WP, so I don't know.

Oh, don't be afraid to just scrap it and start over. Sometimes, that is the easiest. I am working on a site for a friend and am on revision 5. And there will probably be a few more till it gets done.

I set up out church web-site with GoDaddy.com, using their Website Tonight (R) program, and it costs approximately $10 per year, including domain registration. I am limited to five pages and it also uses their banner at the top of the page. That said, I have set up Sermon Audio and a Twitter "Events" feed. We have had several downloads of sermon audio, but no takers on Twitter yet.
If you are interested, our site is www.daytoncenter.org.

Pastor Decker

Timothy -

Did the advertising come as a mandatory part of using their services or could you opt out by paying more for GoDaddy?

I think you're on the right track, setting some goals for your website. Here's a few ideas to help meet those goals.

1. I would recommend SermonAudio (www.sermonaudio.com). Having said that, I really don't like the interface of SermonAudio's site. Its too cluttered. But they offer 10 free sermons per month, an RSS feed, iTunes publishing, and an XML feed which means you could post your sermons on SermonAudio and have people access them from your site without really knowing they are on SermonAudio. Plus, you have a high traffic site like sermonaudio.com linking to your church which will help with #2.

2. Use the tools available from Google. Google Analytics and Local Business are must haves to start with. If you're able to, create a sitemap to submit to Google and other major search engines. With our Joomla sites, we have components plugged in that automatically index our site and submit the info to 5 major search engines.

3. Its fairly easy to add a page with a gospel presentation and even include contact forms for people to be able to respond.

4. Depending on what calendaring system you use, you may be able to embed it right in the website. Google Calendar has this capability. If you're using Outlook with Exchange, it would be much more difficult. This is one of the reasons I really recommend smaller ministries to go with Google Apps. Also, if your church puts out info in a bulletin, you can just copy and paste some of that into the website or post the bulletin itself on the website. Just don't make people download it. There are ways to embed a print file (scribd.com, docstoc.com to name a few). And be careful with a blog. If you're not updating it once a week its probably not worth it for a ministry.

Joomla has a huge developer base. You can see the plugins at extensions.joomla.org. Rockettheme templates come with a lot of great add-ons by default (like image rotators, etc.).

I like the Sermon Browser you have there. I may have to take a look at that and see if I can make it work with some of my Joomla sites. Joomla has a SermonSpeaker component that I've used that is fairly similar, but I like having the flash players so people can listen right away like you have.

As far as the Google Calendar goes, I'm sure there's a way to do it, even if you have to create a blank html page with the calendar and open it in a new window. The print button on the embedded calendar will format it for printing. I'm moving tomorrow, but once we get settled I'll try to PM you with some ideas for embedding.

Google Analytics tracks statistical info about your website. How many visits, where they come from, how they found your site. Its very useful to see what's working and what's not. Local Business allows you to register as a local business with Google so when someone searches for your category, your site can come up higher. It also includes google map integration so when someone finds your church through Google, they see where it is automatically and they can see a lot of information, especially contact information, right from Google. It helps make you look more legitimate. Here's what ours looks like for our school: Silver State Christian School.

Exactly. Our website is hosted with the banner for the cost of annual registration of the domain.
If we paid a monthly fee, would would get more flexibility and no advertising banner.
As the saying goes, "You get what you pay for."

@Will - If you subscribe to Rockettheme, one nice feature that really, really helps with the learning curve is their Rocketlauncher packages. It's basically each month's demo template zipped up in an installer package that you can install on your webhost and it is preconfigured exactly like their demo. This allows you to see how they put together that month's template. For Joomla to work, make sure you have MySQL and PHP available on your webhost. Some hosts are set up specially for Joomla. I'm actually moving my business over to a Virtual Private Server so I can configure the server to be ideal for Joomla.

@Greg Long - After the Super Bowl, I decided not to buy any more domains from GoDaddy (I don't like their hosting, but I've used their domain registration). I went looking for someone else to buy domains from, but I could not find anyone that really compared well. I'm thinking of opening a reseller account with eNom. It's hard to give up on GoDaddy though, because the stuff just works and works well for really cheap. For free hosting, I've seen other alternatives. I used Doteasy for a while and it was fine for a basic website. Once I started with content management systems, I needed a lot more features though.

I agree with 1&1. They are competitively priced and have everything you need, but no ads. I have probably about 10 domains registered through them.

Mark, what's a VPS?

I'll second Will's comment - the ad on the church page is distracting.

Yeah, Daniel pretty much nailed it. The difference between a VPS and the hosting you normally get for cheap, is that on shared (cheap) hosting, you all share the same resources on a server. With a VPS you have resources dedicated to you that no one else can mess up. You also have more control over settings. So I can optimize the settings for Joomla websites (phpsuexec, 755 permissions, etc.) without requiring those settings for everyone else on a shared server. You also tend to get greater speed on a VPS since you have those resources dedicated to you.

That is a good one, but not the one I was talking about, I think, was this one.

DMicah,

I really like Clover, but 1K to purchase a new site seems high and may be out of my church's budget [right now, I'm just gathering information for them to evaluate and consider]. Are there any other sites you'd recommend?

Someone mentioned Plasticmind - is anyone using them?