Building an Online Ministry – Part 3
On Church Growth Consulting we are continuing to build an online ministry site. The site we are putting together is Web Ministry Online. In the previous articles we got the domain name (www.webministryonline.com), we got a free web host at Good News Domains, we installed WordPress, and we set up our initial theme on the site and we uploaded some plugins. Our next step is to add some pages and activate some of the plugins.
Web Ministry Online – Foundation
We will be working with plugins and pages on the WordPress dashboard today. You may want to read a series of articles to familiarize yourself with the process on My Newbie Blog called:
- 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 1
- 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 2
- 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog From Scratch – Part 3
You want to start by changing the tagline. It comes from WordPress as “Just another WordPress blog”. Change it to describe your online ministry. I went with “Fulfilling the Great Comission and the Great Commandment”. You need to change the permalink structure to /%postname%/. This will make the articles easier to find on the Search Engines. You need to make sure that your privacy setting is set to be visible to everyone. This is so the Search Engines can start indexing your site. You will want to activate the All In One SEO plugin. This is easily the most important plugin you can have in regard to SEO.
Create an About, Contact, and Privacy Policy Page. On the About page write a simple description of what you want to accomplish with your online web ministry. On the Contact page, activate the Contact 7 plugin which will give people a form to fill in to contact you. A Privacy Policy is necessary when you are taking information of any kind, including prayer requests. You can find an example of a Privacy Policy on this site. Activate the Verse of the Day plugin and get it running on your site. You need to start writing five or six 300 word articles about your web ministry. This will begin the process of getting your site noticed. Remember our goal is not only having a web ministry for our local church, but ultimately having a ministry that has a world wide reach.
