Communication

The most basic approach to constructing a church website is to publish the same information you might compose if you were preparing a printed brochure. This is the easiest approach since the information rarely changes and therefore rarely needs attention. It’s a good idea to avoid time-sensitive information that requires regular updating until you’re sure you’re ready to keep up with it.

To decide what should appear here, think about your audience. The information in a brochure is essentially stuff your congregation should already know. This site is not for your congregation. This site exists to provide outsiders with the core information about your church and should be built with their needs in mind.

Not only are you providing basic details, your site is an opportunity to make visiting your church as comfortable an experience as possible. Think about the different types of people who might visit and what their unique needs are. For example:

• Where are the handicapped entrances?
• What will I do with my three kids?
• Do I have to wear a suit or is my Harley jacket acceptable?

Let the truth of the gospel make your guests uncomfortable, not finding a seat (that’s a whole different blog…).

At a minimum, I recommend these 7 things:

1. Name and City of your church – the city is important for search success
2. Contact information, such as phone, email and physical address
3. Service times, formats, how people typically dress
4. Maps both to your location and then into your location (i.e., if your “front door” is actually the side entrance, say so!)
5. Core beliefs
6. Children’s programming/childcare available concurrent with services and a mention (not the whole plan) that you have a safety plan in place.
7. Your structure for going deeper (e.g., “We have home groups meeting throughout the week, contact the church office for details”)

As you can see, these are only the basics. Even as I compiled this list, I found myself thinking about other information that would be helpful, like the number of events available for youth each week. Yes, the more that your site can currently reflect your church, the more helpful it will be to your potential guests, but someone has to take responsibility for keeping the growing website beast well-fed and happy and that means making choices.

No matter how comprehensive your site becomes, a good handle on the core elements and being seeker-friendly are important to keep in mind. A couple excellent examples of this on larger sites are the Before You Attend page at New Hope Community Church in Loudonville, Ohio, and the New Here? page at Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas.

Next up: Blog as church website.

We’re rounding out this edition of Google Week with a quick peek at Google Apps. The information, tours and demos over at the Google Apps page are pretty good in their own right, so I won’t make any attempts to give you the full run down of every feature.

In short, Apps is your church website and webserver right out of the [virtual] box. You can get up and running with relatively little or no cost. The most expensive elements for you are decent internet access (which your church may already have) and the computers with which to access it (which your church also probably has), Google takes care of the rest.

The core modules included in the Apps package are familiar: Docs & Spreadsheets, GMail, Page Creator, Talk, and Calendar. We’ve written about a couple of these pieces already and as you are probably aware, they’re already all freely available.

So what’s the big deal? What makes Apps notable is that you can place your own branding on things. During the sign up process, Google will help you acquire your own domain name or transfer an existing one. This means your church web address can go from http://users.randomisp.com/members/~pastorjoe45/church.html to http://www.firstpotluckchurch.org in no time, and your email from pastorjoe45@randomisp.com to joe.schmoe@firstpotluckchurch.com. Apps lets you pull all of these things in under your own umbrella. There is some expense in setting up your own domain, about $10.00, but this is relatively cheap.

There is a Premium Edition of this service for a fee, of course. With this edition you can drop the ads that appear on some pages (notably the email interface), gain access to a room scheduler and have the use of a couple other more technical tools that may or may not be worth the extra cost to you.

We’ve spent the week on Google tools, not because we’re die-hard Google aficionados or that they’re the only option out there, but rather because it’s one of the few places that you can find such a broad spectrum of powerful, competently constructed tools at no cost. There are other options such as Microsoft’s new Office Live that will get you up and running with a professional look for no cost (look for a further review of this tool sometime in the future) – they’ll even buy your domain for you – and we certainly don’t want to diminish the value of those options.

Good stuff… on the web… ready for you to start using today to improve your church’s ability to communicate with your congregation and the world at large.

Google Week Series: [1] [2] [3] [4]