3 Ways To Use A Squidoo Lens With Your Church Website

Posted At : April 4, 2006 12:19 PM | Posted By : Greg Nilsen
Related Categories: goals,resources

Squidoo LensYou may or may not be familiar with Squidoo, a service that allows you to create and share "lenses" which focus on information specified by a "lensmaster". They are a great way to share useful resources that you've found with the world. For you to see a lens in use, I've created the Church Webmaster Resources Lens.

You may be thinking, "Ok, neat...but how would I use them with my church website?".

Here's 3 good ways to use them:

  1. Let Your Pastor Create A "Reading Corner" - There's often a lot of good information on the web, but we don't want to clutter up our church's website with 101 links to different articles. A lens from Squidoo allows you to create this collection of links and have just one link on your website.
  2. Create A Community Of Sites Related To Your Church - Does your church provide services to other groups, or are associated with other ministries that have their own web sites? Do you sponsor missionaries who maintain a website? If you do, then a lens is a great way to coordinate that information into a single place for your visitors to check out.
  3. Publicize Your Church - While it may be in a more indirect way, you can publicize your church through Squidoo. If you have an RSS feed for your church, you can have it displayed on your lens as well. Then you can also tie your lens in with other related sites such as the city or town website, the denomination website, or a similar churches in the area. You can even add a map to your lens to provide easy directions.
As you can see, a Squidoo lens can be applied in a number of different ways. On top of that, they are also extremely easy to maintain. Take some time and see how you can fit it into your website.

And if you'd like to add your website to the Church Webmaster Resources lens, please either leave a comment below or contact us.

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AMK's Gravatar I cannot see why it would be more practicle to use lenses instead of a main church site or even in conjunction with one since a main site already has all its pages?
Even ministries within and without can be connceded either by page or link within the same site. Individual topic lenses in adition might be too much? However in
Saying that I have my own wordpress site. I am not too enthusiastic about the choice of layouts, So I have lensroled some squidoo lenses of mine on it for my customers.
I thought about this for my church too, But all the ministries within the church have there own site which is run on the same format as the church and therefor easier to manage
# Posted By AMK | 1/10/08 4:13 PM
Greg Nilsen's Gravatar I do have to say that over the past 2 years, my views on Squidoo lenses. At that time, they were a great way to build these little communities of links quickly and have them available to a wider audience.

However, many of these features were quickly picked up by blogging software and site developers, quickly rendering Squidoo lenses useless. Anymore, I would recommend achieving the first two possible uses through your church website, and worry about publicizing your church using some of the standard SEO methodologies.

Of course, in two more years I might be saying something completely different. That's how quickly today's internet evolves.
# Posted By Greg Nilsen | 1/12/08 12:49 PM
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