The 6 “golden rules” of awesome church websites

One Response to “The 6 “golden rules” of awesome church websites”

1. chriswalker on July 31st, 2007 1:08 pm

   Ok, this is one of my many hats at my church too. You have hit on a lot of things that I have been looking to incorporate into our church website. My most recent major update is the calendar. I have been frustrated in the past when I would get the monthly calendar sometime during the first week of the month in a Publisher format, and I have to find a way to convert it nicely into HTML to post. It was just getting to be too much work, or I wouldn’t get the calendar on time and it was just a bit of a headache. So a couple of weeks ago I setup a Google Calendar that I embedded into the existing website. I then sat down with the pastor and showed her how it would work. Now our pastor and the church secretary both have access to update this calendar. I add the Youth Calendar right into it when my events get planned so everything is out there now. This has been wonderful so far.
   I want to implement a lot of the other web 2.0 tools, but I am still experimenting with how they interact with the site. I have a bit of a limitation with our host because we go through something called Matrix 49 and it uses Firecracker to create pages. Basically I am forced to select one of the many templates and use that. I can’t create subdomains or anything yet. I am trying to figure out how to embed a blog into it so that I don’t have to link over to something like Wordpress or Blogger. But I am still dealing with people sending me word documents for the website. One nice thing that I have found is that if I receive the attachments in my GMail account, I can open as HTML and then view the source. I then can copy out only the part that I need and paste it right into the code window of the site.
   My biggest problem that I have run into as far as keeping it updated is that I rely on other people for a lot of the main content. So far this week, I have not successfully received all of the announcements or anything from the secretary. My next option is to take my handy church bulletin and update everything by hand, but who has the time to do that anymore? So if you have any suggestions for encouraging people to send content updates consistently, that would be very helpful. I am thinking that I am going to have to do a computer training for church leadership. You have to understand that I stick out like a sore thumb in my church as the average age is something like 55. There is a huge learning curve when it comes to technology at my church. Fortunately, our new Pastor is plugged in and has been very good about promoting the website and reminding people to send me updates. It just hasn’t quite paid off yet.

   OK, good show guys. I hope my added commentary adds to the conversation. At least our Facebook group is now about as big as the listeners now. Oh and I am surprised Josh, that you don’t know what dossier is. I learned that word playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego when I was like 10.

   -c-

Leave a Reply