So, your church has a website. Great! Would anyone want to find it?
Last week I wrote about how important it is for church websites to show up near the top of the search results when people in the community search online for a church. That’s the first step. Once a person sees your church’s website, will they want to visit your church?
Unfortunately, most church websites seem to be created to inform the existing members of the church rather than to reach out to people in the community. With Internet Evangelism Day only 3 days away I thought this would be a good time to remind everyone of some tips to help your website connect better with unbelievers. This could serve as a good topic of conversation for an IED meeting of your church leaders or web team.
Much as already been written on this topic, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I recommend reading How inclusive is your church website?
I also highly recommend the Church Website Assessment Tool, which is a free tool available on the IED website. It’s such a great tool that we added a link to it in on the admin control panel of our NE1 Website Builder so our member sites would have easy access.
Speaking of NE1, it’s important to note that not all web builders or content management systems support all of the things that should be done to help a church website appeal to visitors and be optimized for search engines. You may find that your system doesn’t include a sitemap or it doesn’t allow you to set the title tag and meta tags for each page individually. We designed NE1 to support the recommendations of the Church Website Assessment Tool. In fact, we added 6 new features today for that purpose.
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April 25th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I don’t have a website but I am interested in building a Christian website in which I can showcase my Christian poems, articles, sermons, and books. I am interested in having audio as well and visual where people can see the actual preaching instead of just hearing it.
What do you suggest?
April 25th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hi Alfredo, that really depends on your budget and your technical abilities. OurChurch.Com offers everything from free sites you can build yourself to custom content management sites. I’ve forwarded your question to our support staff so they can help you understand the solution that would be best for you.