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How To Build a Simple Low Cost (or no cost) Church Website:Step One: Find a Host, free or not- Many sites will give you free webhosting in exchange for ads that you have little or no control over.
- Many places (like CrownWeb) have low cost webhosting, which can still be too expensive for small churches.
- I like ForMinistry, but there are other free sites for churches out there (a logo and occasional Bible-themed ads is the price you pay for a website).
- I recently started this website at Weebly, which is absolutely free, and I highly recommend it.
- You can also get a free "page" at Facebook, or a free blog at Blogger, both of which could serve as an acceptable online presence for your small church.
Step Two: Get a Domain, dot com- ForMinistry come with a free domain, but it will just be an odd string of letters, difficult for your members to remember.
- Wherever you choose to host your site will likely give you a break on the cost of a domain.
- You can also get substantial discounts the longer the amount of time you register your domain for (we pay $15. yearly and it is our only web related cost).
Step Three: Choose your Template, make everything easy to change- Your template will likely come from your host.
- ForMinistry makes it easy to change the colors and themes of my entire site in seconds. I change mine seasonally.
Step Four: Start collecting Content, in web design, content is king!- You have to give people a reason to visit your site, and keep coming back
- Audio or text sermons, church pictures, directories, and ideas your church has developed for VBS, skits, or camp are good ways to add content.
- Get ideas from other churches and Bible study websites.
Step Five: Use Automatic Updates, keep it fresh- Find websites that cater to webmasters who like to keep their sites easily updated!
- Some examples of automatically updating content would be devotionals, quizzes, Bible verses, comic strips, news feeds, review feeds, etc.
Step Six: Check for Newbie Pitfalls, research online
Step Seven: Play with Coding, HTML for beginners- First, learn as much as you can from online free sites
- Then, play around with free scripts and HTML codes. Don't worry, you can't break them! Just be sure to save them in a text program before you start fiddling with them, so you can always change them back.
Step Eight: Check Everything, from working links to typos!- Nothing makes your site look amateurish than poor spelling or lots of broken links!
- There are free sites where you can see how your site looks in other browsers and in different screen sizes. Not everyone sees what YOU see on your computer screen.
- Ask people in your church to preview the site at home and give you feedback.
Step Nine: Add Meta Tags, keywords and site description- ForMinistry allows you to do this quickly with a site building tool.
- Meta tags are how your site is indexed in search engines. Having good and descriptive meta tags is the best way to get your site to where people can find it.
- It takes a while for the spiders to crawl the web and associate certain keywords with your site, be patient.
Step Ten: Add a Sitemap, Second Way to Navigate, and/or Search- Especially if you have a special menu bar (ie: an applet), you need a simple way to navigate in case your menu bar is not visible to some visitors.
- Clickable text links at the bottom of your pages which allow people to go into the main areas of your site are advisable.
- "Bread crumbs" (the links at the top, right of each page) are another way to make your site easier to navigate.
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