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Static
Website |
There are far too many church websites out there that are neglected or appear to be abandoned.
Some look really great, some look very ambitious, perhaps contracted by a professional firm. The problem is that nobody is
taking care of these sites. Far better to post a simple static (nothing changes) website. The members won't go there because
there is nothing new, nothing different each time they visit. But there are a lot of people who will want to know who the
pastor is, where the church is located, how to get there, what time the church services start and contact information such as
a phone number. Our minister pastors two churches. The second is a small congregation and nobody has volunteered to update
the calendar. So I built them a simple one page website that is hosted
off our church's website. |
Adventist
Organizational
Directory |
Here is how the same
Stevenson Seventh-day Adventist Church appears in the Adventist Organizational Directory. If your church does not have a
website, pretend you are a potential visitor from out of town. Use your favorite search engine (e.g. Google) and see if you
are satisfied with what the search engine finds for you when looking for your church. If you are happy with the results, then
perhaps your church does not even need to develop a static website. Postpone the website until the church is committed to
keeping it up to date. |
Add a
Calendar
Very Simple
Content
Management |
Back to the static website discussed earlier. It would be easy enough for me to add a link to a
Calendar.doc file that a church member could update once a week/month. A calendar in Word document form is easy enough to
create, maintain and upload and most people with a PC can open and read a Word file. Converting the file to PDF format is a
bit more involved and probably not worth the hassle for such a simple website. Many of the church members will be checking out
the calendar each week so you may want to feature a couple of other Word documents that can be updated routinely. This is
content management in it's simplest form. |
Fancy
Calendars |
There are some fancy looking website calendars available on the internet and many of them don't
cost anything. You can connect them up to your website without having to purchase a content management system. The reason I
don't feature a fancy calendar on my website is that the church office is already doing a Word document calendar to fold into
the printed bulletin each week. Expecting the church office to also maintain a website calendar would, in our case, be asking
a bit too much. If your church office likes the idea, then go for it. Review the idea with those who will be doing the
updates. They need to know what is involved before they approve the plan. I would much rather feature a simple up to date Word
document than a out of date fancy calendar. |
Content
Management
Systems |
You would purchase a content management system if you want the church office to do all or most of
the updates. The companies that do content management systems use a large database and easy to use templates in order to
keep the costs down. The content on the pages is updated by the church office without having to know anything about website
design or HTML. Many of the companies (e.g. TAGnet) listed on the Service Providers page
do feature content managed systems. The Simple Updates site is worth checking out
to get a better idea of the features and usability. |
A More
Complicated
Website |
A custom designed website can be built by a church member, a church member team or contracted to
a website design person, team or company. New pages can be added and deleted. Popular features can grow further. The less
popular and obsolete pages can be weeded out. Host an evangelistic series at your church and you can build a web page or two
to feature it. |
Dynamically
Alive |
To really get going with a website, to make it alive and popular, you will want to add additional
content such as the pastor's sermons, photo pages, special stories and a whole lot more. The more dynamically changing and up
to date the content, the more people will want to visit the web site, more frequently, which tends to motivate the team to
furnish even more up to date content. |
