Building a Church Website – Web
Building a Church Website
Chris Ryerson
Have you been asked to build a website for your church Building There are thousands of people building websites everyday. It is becoming increasingly important for many small organizations and groups to build their online presence. This helps in getting their ideals, goals, and mission out to the general public. Therefore at an increasing rate many of us with computer skills are asked by organizations to put together a website. This happened to me about two years ago when the school I worked at asked me to build a website for them to help advertise their special arts programs.
The only problem with this is many of us do not have the skills nor the time to build and keep up a whole site. It takes a lot to be the webmaster of a website and it is no simple task. However often it is too expensive to pay a web designer to build a custom site for an organization and so the task often falls to an armature or even some one with no experience. This is what happened to me with the website that I build for my school. I didnt have the first clue about website design or html. So that forced me to learn the basics and use what tutorials and templates that i could find online. I made it through the experience and like many others found that it was a lot of fun. Therefore I started building a bunch of other sites. I would bet that this happens to many.
This article will help the beginning web designer or even volunteer set up a basic Church website. However since there is not a lot of money to spend on the project and often people have really unrealistic ideas about what a website can do we will give you some good guidelines and tips to get started.
The first thing that you need to have a real good idea about is your level of experience with building websites. It is really important to be honest with yourself and the church that you belong to in order to create a realistic expectation. If you are a beginner then it is fine to admit that, we all have to start somewhere. However, if you are a beginner dont plan on building an elaborate SQL php backend that can be dynamically updated or anything like that. Below I have provided some basic definitions of skill level that might help you assess where you are at.
Beginner - You are this level fall anywhere in between never setting up a site to having built a site or two with an online website builder or a pre made website like those provided on Yahoo, or AngelFire.
Intermediate - If you have either set up a website with an online builder and customized the site some or built a website using a template then you fall into the intermediate category.
Advanced - You have set up many sites before and often use templates for ideas but tweak them so much they hardly resemble the template when you are finished.
How you choose to build your website depends largely on two factors, your time commitment to the project and your skill level. These two factors have a strong correlation between them. Meaning if you have lots of time and are a beginning you will be able to build more advanced websites. However if you are an advanced designer and have very little time to build another site then you will want to go with something very basic. If you fall on either the not enough time or not enough experience end of the spectrum then you should really consider buying a template to either make your site or at least get you started. However if you are at the intermediate or advanced level and have time then you should forgo the template and create a really cool design yourself.
Some of the tools that you will need to build any website are included below:
Graphics Software - The standard for creating website is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has a great add-on product that comes with the software that allows you to slice the images you create and export them as html.
HTML editor - This can be anything from Microsoft Notepad all the way up to a high end WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get and it means that the program does the html coding for you. Some editors that you might want to look into would be ranked from least expensive to most Coffee Cup HTML Editor, Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Before you start with getting your hands dirty it is really important to lie a good foundation for your website. In order to have a high quality website it is important to have a good foundation and site plan before you start. In a Church, School, or Club it is important to have a group of people working on the website planning. The actual work might be carried out by one person but it is important to have a group plan the site plan in order to get global perspective of the organization. During this stage it is important to gather ideas, thought, and and opinions and get them down on paper. As the group refines their plans it is important to come up with a site map. A site map is a graphical representation of every page that will be on the website and how they will connect to each other. It is also important to get some basic ideas on the layout of the site.
Next you can go online and check find the templates that are available. Look around and find different ideas and templates. If you are like many people you might find that one template does not work. I often want a part of one and part of another template. If this is the case and you are experienced it is not really a problem but if you are new to website design then you might want to pay someone to customize the site for you. You can see some resources on our site dealing with template customization and templates.
It is important now if possible to assign sections of the website to different individuals. They dont even need any experience with website design. If they can type you will be able to use them. Assign sections to each member of the team to complete. That team member will then work on their own computer in Microsoft word or a simple text editor to create the text and collect any graphics, pictures, or sounds that they would like to add to the site.
Below is a list of some of the content areas that you might want to include on a church website
Events
Services
Calendar
About the Priest or Pastor
Churchs Mission Statement
gallery of recent church activity
picture tour of the church
Sunday school or singles groups etc.
Each member can then turn in their section of the website on a disk to you and you will compile all of them onto the actual website. You can often do this by a simple cut and past command in most WYSIWYG editors. It is important at this stage to name all of the files in a consistent way and stick to the site map. If you make changes to the site as you are building make sure you reflect these changes on your site map. It can become very easy to build a huge website with literally 1,000s of of files including images, html documents and much more. If you are not consistent with your file naming and site map then you will not be able to update or make changes tot he website because you will be lost.
Once your website if complete you will need to find a host and upload it to the host. If you have trouble at this stage typically the host will help you with it. After your site is up then you will breathe a big sigh of relief and feel like you dont want to see the site ever again. However the work has only really begun because website are constantly evolving an have to reflect what is happening in the world and your organization. So your work has only begun. You will now need to work to publicize your site sot hat people can find it and you will need to continually update the site and keep the content fresh and up to date.
About The Author
This article was written by: Chris Ryerson who is the owner and designer of over 10 sites that are currently on the web. If you are interested in reading this article and other articles like it you can go to http://www.crowntemplates.com/articles. You may also want to check out the wide variety of Templates and Free Webmaster tools at Crown Templates.
marketing@crowntemplates.com
8 Steps to Design a Surfer Friendly Website That Search Engines Love! – Web
8 Steps to Design a Surfer Friendly Website That Search Engines Love!
Venkata Ramana
1 Crystal Clear Source Code HTML/CSS
Many web-designers give far too much importance to the look and the graphics of the website while ignoring the clarity of the source code. Clean and well-written source code is the first step to website design success. If a spider cannot find your keywords, you might just as well forget about search engine optimization.
2 Keywords in Title Tags.
Keywords in the title tags are one of the most important factors for optimization. Search engines display your title tags in the search results. This tells surfers what your page is about.
3 Easy Navigation Links.
While preparing the layout of your website, remember the navigation links. They must be clearly visible. Hidden links must be removed. Navigation links embedded with key words are an asset in search engine ranking. But beware -- stuffing your navigation links with too many keywords may land you in trouble!
4 Keyword Rich
Pages BUT Understandable Content. Yes - search engines love keyword rich content. This does not mean you have to stuff your articles with meaningless sentences. A keyword rich article can contain a keyword density of five to seven percent. Your articles must also be well edited to make them both search engine and user friendly. Invisible keywords and keyword-spamming are a no-no.
5 Using Heading Tags , etc. For Ease of Reading and Search Engine Friendliness.
Using and heading tags will help the user read your articles more easily. is used for the headline; and are used for section heads and subheads. The lower the number, the larger the font size assuming you havent modified them differently. Using , fonts will help the search engines easily understand the importance of the content in your pages. Keywords in header tags are also given more weight.
6 Fast Loading Images That Trigger Emotions
Fast loading images, are very important in designing your website. Using Flash and heavy images will increase the loading time of your website. The faster your site loads, the easier it becomes for your visitor to understand your content.
7 Use Alt-Tags for Text ONLY Browsers.
Using alt tags for all your images will help your surfers who use text only browsers. Here is an example of alt tag: Many search engies use alt tags to determine the keyword relevancy.
8 Site Maps
A site map lists all the pages you feel are important for the search engines to index. SiteMaps are very important if you want search engine spiders to index each and every page of your site. A site map also provides a guide to your entire website content and helps your visitor navigate your site easily.
About The Author
Venkata Ramana has been helping webmasters to get highly targeted traffic to their websites. Join his 5 day "Targeted Traffic Secrets" course and discover 5 No-FAIL Targeted Traffic Tactics.
http://www.targetedTrafficForEver.com
Growing Your Business In CyberSpace – Web
Growing Your Business In CyberSpace
Mark Sincevich
A synopsis of Philippa Gamses Presentation to the National Speakers Association, Washington DC chapter on Saturday, January 10, 2004
Someone had asked Philippa why Websites are such a pain in a pre-seminar question. Her opening reply was simple, yet powerful, "when you stop improving your site, you stop growing." She believes that Websites are a work in progress much like a business plan or ones own self-improvement. In fact, the first question you should ask yourself about your own Website is, "What does it really do for people"
The second question is "Who is your audience" You see, websites are really a lot like a business plan! If you are trying to attract prospective clients, then each individual page on your site should offer something of value to your audience. The number one way that Philippa adds value to her audience is through her articles. The best way to keep getting top listings with the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN, is to constantly change or add content. Her articles add value to her audience and are her number one search engine strategy. Maybe this is why she doesnt cold-call. Her customers tell her that they have seen her name in multiple locations before they call her directly.
She said that we should think about the emotional connection that our website makes. How does your website represent you when you are not there Unfortunately most websites are not a true reflection of what we do and who we are. The reality is that our websites need to become an expertise center. We need to show a clear benefit such as how our programs will increase the creativity and balance of a prospective customer. Every page should have a strategy, a way to increase our database and provide a call to action.
Philippa also believes that each web site should have a dynamite testimonial across the front of the homepage, because testimonials are the least-viewed section on every website! She recommends that we pull out our testimonials and sprinkle them throughout our site. And when we think of testimonials, we should be thinking about the substantive ways that we have helped our customers. If we attempt to be clear and specific about our program benefits, why not be clear and specific about their outcomes from real customers. She recommends that we have specific testimonials for specific programs. Talk about maximizing our congruency!
In order to get started, Philippa wants to know what we have done today to improve our website. Two days after her seminar, I added a question and answer section and submitted my site to a dozen search engines. My next step is to write another article. What are you going to do today to improve your web site, your business and even yourself She encourages you to contact her about the changes you have made.
For more information on how to improve your website further, Philippa recommends that you download her tip sheet, "Twenty-Three Proven Tips and Ideas for On-Line Marketing" at http://www.cyberspeaker.com/tipsheet.html. Philippa can be contacted directly at her office in Santa Cruz, California at 831-465-0317 or pgamse@cyberspeaker.com. If she doesnt get back to you immediately, it is due to her ongoing quest to find the best deli sandwich outside of New York City.
c 2004, Mark Sincevich. All rights in all media reserved.
About The Author
Mark Sincevich is a professional speaker, photographer and author of two books and numerous articles. He works with organizations to increase their creativity, balance, leadership and personal development. He can be reached at 301-654-3010, mark@staashpress.com, or http://www.staashpress.com.