Here at If Jesus Had A Website, we're always looking for better ways to get you the information you need. So, today, we'd like to introduce the addition of RSS 2.0 syndication. Now you can catch up on all your IJHAW news from your news aggrigator.
When Jesus preached to the world during his time on earth, he almost always preached in large venues, where as many as possible could come and hear the Truth of the Lord. He didn't hide his teachings in a dark corner of the city hoping people would stumble across them, but he put the message forth to as broad an audience as possible.
While there are many lessons to learn as a church webmaster, none is harder than establishing your church's voice on the internet. But with so much going on in the world wide web, this is often a difficult task. We need to find as many ways as possible to make our church website as easy to find as possible. Otherwise, our sites will just continue to hide among all the commotion and not be effective outreach tools.
So, how do we make our sites easy to find?
So, those are my suggestions to get you started. Please let me know if I missed anything important!
Almost everyone knows what a blog is nowadays. Shoot; it seems like almost everyone HAS a blog anymore. They've swept the internet as a craze, but have held strong to show that they are not just a fad.
The reason that blogs have become so popular is twofold: they provide a more personal means of communication, and they have a simple enough interface that most anyone can maintain them. The addition of features such as comments can often help make a great interactive atmosphere that most people seem to welcome.
It is exactly this kind of format that makes blogs great evangelical tools, and they can serve of great use to your church website if they are used properly. A blog can be a great place for your pastor or pastors to share about themselves and the religious issues that are of importance at the time. Even prayer requests fit well into this format. This can help encourage discussion amongst the members of your church through comments, as well as involve those who come across your church website.
While blogs can be great tools, they also come with a good deal of responsibility. Blogs need to be updated regularly or else they tend to lose their impact. If someone likes what they've read on your blog and see that it gets updated regularly, then they are more likely to check back and see what's up next on the blog. If they do end up coming back a few times and no updates have been made, it is quite possible they may never return to that blog.
The other responsibility of a blog is self-moderation. Your blog author must be responsible for watching over what they write and the image they present. Once something is posted on a blog, while it may be edited at a later date, it may not always be "taken back" if it's already been read. So beware that a poorly moderated blog can actually severely detract from your website's impression on visitors.
However, a well utilized blog can be an outstanding asset to your church website as a powerful outreach tool. Every church, both large and small, can benefit greatly from them.
In the third part of a series on website content, we will discuss questions that arrise based from the premise "If Jesus Had A Website…" in order to better analyze approaches and expectations of church website content.
However, just because a level of equality has been reached, it doesn't mean both men and women should be treated the same. In an interesting article from CBN, David Morrow takes a look at Why Men Hate Church.
While this article may not apply to your church situation directly, it is important to note that we can rarely expect to reach both a male and female base through a single message. Now, I'm not advocating the creation of a "Men's Site" and a "Women's Site", but I am cautioning against creating a site that is too male or female oriented if it is a site directed at both genders (yes, . If you are the sole person in charge of the content on your church's website, be sure to step outside of your writing comfort zone from time to time and try something from another perspective. Maybe take a different approach to what may seem like traditional topics. Or try covering a broader spectrum of topics, even if they are of little interest to you personally.
As Paul instructed us to be all things to all men, you should try to reach as broad a variety of people as possible.
Take that step outside of your comfort zone, and you may find that you can reach others more effectively.
Do you remember school dances when you were younger? There were the kids who danced together out on the dance floor, and there were the wallflowers who watched them dance.
"Ok. Thanks Greg for bringing back good/bad images of my childhood, but what's the point?"
The point is that church websites can be very similar to websites at this continuous dance called "the internet". You may have seen this article in the column to the right from ChristianPost.com, but I thought this it was a particularly interesting read that needed to be hilighted:
Study Shows Churches Not Making Full Use of the Power of the Internet
Take a minute to read over that, because it brings up several good points that every church needs to consider:
So, is your church website a dancer or a wallflower? If it is a wallflower, maybe it's time to teach it to dance. No one ever made a difference by sitting on the sidelines.
One option for your church website that we have yet to discuss is the use of a church website design service. Normally, I'm an advocate of having a technically savvy person who can program everything needed for your church, but I do realize that many churches do not get this luxury. In fact, many church webmasters are simply the "most technical person available" and may not have a background in design and development. Several years ago, this may have been a problem, but recently more and more of these design services that can help just about anyone take a few steps towards their ideal church website.
Now, before getting into details about different service types, let me just preface this discussion by stating that no service is going to be able to give you exactly what you want over the long-term. This is because most services are designed around a framework of "most requested" features and designs. If you want to venture significantly outside of that framework in order to distinguish your church website from others who use the same service, it will either require more technical knowledge or money to pay for these distinct features or designs.
Nonetheless, these services are a great resources for churches who have not been blessed with a savvy web programmer. There are many services out there, and they run the gamut in terms of designs, features and approaches.
Some services are almost strictly web-based and allow you to make all changes to the design and content through a web-based interface (often referred to as a portal). Everything that affects your website goes through this portal. While these are often very convenient, and typically relatively inexpensive, the choices available in them are often very limited. Typically, most of the sites created through the provided portal appear very similar to one another (and can hard to make your site stand out on the internet).
Other services will communicate directly with a church through e-mail, phone or even in person to help develop a custom solution for the church. They will tailor the design and features to your needs, and sometimes even train people to use the system. While content changes can typically be done over the internet with a service like this, because of the custom design most design changes require the involvement of the design service representatives. While these types of services can often provide you with a much more distinctive and feature-rich website for you, they typically come at a much higher price due to all of the professional involvement.
Now, there are services that stretch almost everywhere in between the two I have presented here, and once again, you have to analyze the needs and resources of your church to come up with the approach that is best for you. So while God may not have blessed your church with a savvy programmer, fear not, for He has provided for your needs. You just need to know where to look!