Your website is the first experience many newcomers and seekers have with your church. Before setting foot in the door, before the greeters offer a warm welcome, and before the hospitality of coffee hour, your website has already made that critical first impression.
Digital presence is increasingly the first point of contact and of evangelism.
A website is an essential communication tool. It is no longer a luxury to have a website; it is a requirement to reach seekers and potential newcomers, and it can help retain connection with your occasional members.
Not every church can afford a website created from scratch or has the technical skills within the community to build it themselves.
Fortunately, there are some simple, free or low-cost solutions that can get you up and running in no time. These online services will host your site, removing all the back-end technical work, and most of them offer professionally designed and developed templates for the design and layout of your sites.
My suggestion is to avoid drag-and-drop solutions and instead find a template that you like and rely on the business, design and development skills that professionals have put into it. Unless you are a professional designer, use a template.
Some websites that offer these services include Weebly.com, Wix.com and WordPress.com.
Each has their pros and cons. I prefer WordPress because of its extensibility, support, and freedom to change hosting, but the learning curve can be challenging for some. Weebly or Wix may be preferred options for smaller communities or for those just getting their toes wet.
All of these providers offer free hosting at their domain. While this might seem easy, it is in your best interest to register your own domain name and connect it with your new website — a feature all of the
above services support.
Not only does a hosted domain look unprofessional, but also it means that if you ever change hosting providers, your address changes, too. Every link that points to your site will break, all the search engine history you have built up will be lost, and every bookmark to your site will be broken.
Using your own domain is a relatively inexpensive option — around $15 a year — and instead of the long stswithins.wordpress.com, you can invest in stswithins.com. Then when you are ready to upgrade to a new site you don’t need to change your address again.
Next, you need to develop your content. When building your site, think about the three main audiences: newcomers, seekers and existing parishioners.
All three of these audiences will visit your site, so consider how your content speaks to each of them and make sure they can find what they are looking for.
Getting your church online can seem scary. But there are many tools that can help each church have a professionally designed and developed website at a low cost.
A little time and effort can go a long way into reaching out with the love of God to newcomers and seekers alike.