I will go ahead and say it. Homepage redesigns are the worst! They are the central focus point for any church. Everyone wants representation there. Every event demands attention. Each of your personas has the possibility of landing here. How do you do the impossible task of designing for everyone? My suggestion is to proceed with patience and planning. Here are my tips on the dreaded homepage update.
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When to Use Gated Content at your Church
Gated content is premium website content that sits behind some type of barrier. This seems counterintuitive to the Gospel message. We are to share the Good News with the world. Yet in some cases, gated content can help your church grow. The key is knowing when to use this practice. In this article, I will dig into this technique in greater detail.
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We do not want to think about members leaving the church. But we must admit that it happens. Sometimes they just want to switch churches. Other times they are leaving their faith behind. Regardless of the situation, we should provide an easy way for them to exit. This article explores how to create an easy and accurate method for members to leave your church.
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Focusing Your Church’s Digital Strategies
So much to do, such little time. Where do you invest your precious resources? Focus your church’s digital ministries in two areas. First is your stable market; already engaged church members. Second is your growth market; or who will best expand your ministries. Both are important, and need unique attention in the digital space. Here are a few tips on how to engage each.
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Missions: How Your Church’s Digital Platforms Can Serve
Nearly all churches run or provide resources to missions. Yet how can your church’s digital platforms best support them? You should already have procedures and tools in place to promote your basic ministries. This article tell you how to adapt them to give the recognition, support, and prominence they need.
I have wanted to write about missions for a while. They are a key part of many churches’ outreach and inreach strategies. Some missions
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Make a Mediocre Church Website
The world does not need the perfect church website. What it needs is your church’s website inviting people to experience the Gospel now. If it is not online, no message gets out. Every day you wait for perfection is another day your voice is not heard. Instead of creating the prefect website, publish your best draft. You will make some mistakes along the way, but those learning experiences will shape your future. This article will explore two scenarios your church may be in.
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CWS Podcast – Ep. 40: Defining Webiste Victory
This is a shorter but still very important podcast episode that talks about success and failure. Basically, if you are not defining webiste victory, you will never know if you achieved it. As I mentioned in last week’s episode, your church website should evolve via small projects. Each project is part of a strategic roadmap to get you to a new level of success. But each project needs clear goals and definition of what is considered a “win”. If not, you will not know if you succeeded, and more importantly, when you failed.
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CWS Podcast – Ep. 28: Get Your Church Known
Just having a church website is not enough today. You need to be proactive in your quest to get your church seen and heard on the internet. So what methods can you use to accomplish this? I propose you initially cove three primary bases; search engines, mapping services, and social media. These three are often very entangled, so spearheading efforts on all of them at once is often very easy and can generate awesome synergy to get your church known to the rest of the Internet.
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CWS Podcast – Ep. 14: Merging Church Strategy with Website Strategy
This episode is a crash course in creating a website strategy; however I am going out of my comfort zone and am asking that it merges with your overall church strategy. Afterall, your website is a tool that supports your church, not the other way around. Thus the first order of business is determining what your church goals are; then how your website can support them. While I am no pastor or church strategist, I do know common church goals and have plenty of professional experience in tying business goals to website features.
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CWS Podcast – Ep. 8: Why Even Have a Website?
We consider many things in life necessary to survival. In our culture, a car is often considered essential to living life. Yet if you live in a city such as New York where there is a significant infrastructure of subways and busses, cars are almost seen as a burden. So with the availability of web properties in social media; why even have a website?
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More Than A Website: Internet Church Campus
With the advances in technology, a new concept has taken hold in multi-site churches. This is the Internet church campus. In this article I will discuss the obstacles, how to overcome them, and how your church leadership and members can eventually work toward accepting it as an authentic outreach and ministry tool.
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More Than A Website: Internet Ministry
Various technologies can be used to share the message of the Gospel. What is your church using? Many will argue it is not as authentic as face-to-face conversations. However, the ability to reach a global audience with inexpensive tools cannot be ignored.