I thought I’d start a little space here on Church Resources were I can offer a little more advice for you, your church and your media. First let me share something – “I’m not a guru, expert or anything else” – esp when it comes to media. I have however spent over 14 years online – if you want to learn more about me check out www.keranmckenzie.com – anyway, this is not about me. Instead I want to just share some resources, tools and such like that you might find helpful in your journey.
Church Website:
Lets start with your website. You’ve been approached because you know something about the web – although I’m sure actually being willing to donate hours of your own time is … well lets just say most people don’t really want to work on their church website.
First things first, as with any website, answer the following questions BEFORE you do anything:
- What is the purpose of this site? is it simply to say “Hey were are HERE and at THESE times” or is it to allow those who miss a service to catch up with the sermon? Maybe it’s about extending the ministry of your church beyond it’s physical borders or simply a place to put notices, share photos and activities from within the church family
- What needs to be uploaded & when? Once you’ve answered the first Q, this one will start to make sense. For example will the sermons need to be online within an hour of the service? What photos will be uploaded after an event and do you need video too? How about podcasts and MP3
- Who is helping & who’s in charge? Ahh yes at some point you need to build up a team to help. What parts of the site can they update, what can’t they do? Can they change themes, edit sermons or simply add a notice or two?
- What about blogs, traffic and media? Does your pastoral team (or pastor?) need space to blog, to share their slice of the ministry online? What about the kids ministry, the youth or the seniors teams? Are you going to support Facebook, Twitter or other media?
- Who is writing the content? This one is a big one as the person building the site probably isn’t a copywriter and it’s a huge drain on one person to simply expect them to magically create a site & all the content. Content should come from the people of the church – the different ministry leaders.
There are lots of other questions too, however these will help you start to form a picutre of what your church wants/needs in it’s website. Once you have this information look at it and say “What skills/resources do we have in our congregation” – this is a great filter that can help you as a church figure out step one for your website. I’d suggest that NO CHURCH pays to get the first generation of their website up and running – there will be someone in the church who can help craft the first version.
Be prepared to review: you need to review the website regularly (monthly for a start) so you can see how it is going alongside the vision of your church. If the website is wandering away, pull it back, drop stuff out – if Twitter is a distraction on the site, remove it. If no one uses the sermons – then they shouldn’t be there.
Website technology
Okay so you’ve answered all the questions & you are eager to go build your site. I’m going to recommend you go straight to WordPress and forget everything else. Forget Ekklesia360, forget ExpressionEngine, forget Joomla – why? Ekklesia360 is fantastic but rediculously expensive, ExpressionEngine is wonderful but complicated (if you have an EE person in your church do anything to get them to build your site using EE, it is seriously great), Joomla is (imho) a steaming pile of ***** (oh this is a G rated site).
Why WordPress? WordPress is the number 1 blogging platform on the web today. You can get it in Hosted & self hosting versions. It comes as a ONE CLICK install on many hosting providers, it can be extended to do whatever you want through plugins, it’s FREE, it’s constantly updated, it’s easily themed, it’s powerful yet simple. It’s FAST – you can have a full website up and running within 30 mins from install to themed.
Pick what works: look the reality is you should pick what works for you. If you have a web developer in your church who knows what they are doing – trust them, HOWEVER one cavet on this – there is NO reason, NONE, ZIP, NADDA, NOT A BEAN, for any web developer to have to BUILD you a site from the ground up. This is a total waste of their time & your money. USE an existing platform and extend it.
Website design
So, you’ve now decided on a platform and you need to create a look for your site. Again I’m going to say only at the LAST resort should you actually design something? Why? Again it’s a complete and utter waste of time and resouces. Now that being said I’m a HUGE fan of design – love it, heck it’s what helped me buy my house. However designing a church website from the ground up is time consuming and resource consuming.
This is another reason I suggest WordPress – THEMES. WordPress supports themes, which means you download a theme, install it and click a button – boom, your entire site changes. There are TONS and TONS of WordPress themes out there, find one that works, then customise that, give it to your designer and ask them to tweak it. This will reduce all parties workloads by such a HUGE amount of time.
I highly recommend WOOTHEMES – yes you have to pay for them, but these guys KNOW what they are doing. Their themes are beautiful, built for all browsers, fully tested, fully supported. (Some of theme are even FREE!) Here are some Woo Themes I would suggest for church websites:
- Cushy – a lovely soft theme with room for great visuals
- WooTube – a beautiful theme ready for multimedia and video
- THiCK – a funky theme full of pages for different content types
- Ambience – a fresh modern site perfect for a young vibrant church
Website extras
Now that you’ve got your site you need to think about the extras around your site. You MUST include Google Analytics on your site so you can build up a picture of who’s coming to your site, what pages they are visiting, where they are coming from. These questions help you see what effect your website is having on your ministry. If 90% of your visitors are from out of town/country and they hit up your sermons section – you have a huge ministry oportunity to reach people beyond your physical location.
SPAM: make sure your website is set up with spam filtering ESP if you run comments on your site – WordPress supports Akismet for this and it’s great. WordPress also supports heaps of plugins for things like PodCasts, related content and media. Spend some time deciding what extras you really need – and weigh each of them up against the vision for this site.
Website hosting
There are a ton of hosts out there for websites, there really are. Personally I use MediaTemple (MT) – I know a couple of the guys there & have to say their support is pretty good. See the reality is hosting technology now is pretty much .. well an even playing feild. You can go to DreamHost and get rediculous amounts of traffic & space and pay $9 a month, OR you can pay $20 a month go to MediaTemple and know that they are there 24/7 and will respond to your needs pretty quickly.
Of course both (MT) and DreamHost allow you to host multiple domains on one account – great if your church has multiple sites for the different ministries within the church.
Church computers:
This one’s a tricky one, I’m going to come right out and say MAC, of course I would, I’m a mac nut. What ever you decide, go for the BEST your budget can afford – second hand if you HAVE too, but not just because you can okay! God expects our best, why settle for hand me down technology? (and with that … I’ll wrap this up here, and continue it soon I promise!)