This Church Growth Consulting site exists to help Pastors and leaders grow the church. To that end we provide a wide variety of information. We believe that the Internet is an amazing tool for church growth. We work with our sister sites, Church Web Master and Web Ministry Online to cover all aspects of web ministry. If you are not yet utilizing the Internet in your ministry, we want to encourage you to read the articles on these three sites to see some of the ways you can put the Internet to work to advance the Kingdom of God. We write most of our Church Growth Software articles on our sister sites, but we thought we would touch on it here for our church growth consulting readers.
On all of our websites we have a software program (Statcounter) that allows us to see what keywords people used to find our websites. These keywords often lead to ideas we use to bring more people to the sites. We feel that one of the biggest impacts we can have for the Kingdom of God is to get as many people as we can involved in the process of growing the church. The more people that visit our websites, the better the opportunity to impact the Kingdom.
Recently we have had some people that came to the site by searching for the keywords “Church Outreach Consultant” and “Church Growth and Technology”. Both of these keywords will make excellent future topics for the website. We will begin writing articles about both these topics which should draw more people to the site. This same idea holds true for your web ministries. As you utilize the software available to tell you what is drawing people to your web ministry, you can beef that part of your ministry up to have even more impact.
I have been continuing the work on our example Church Web Site. To make the process a little more interesting I decided to take the new theme and start a Church Web Site called Florida Keys Vineyard Churches. One of the reasons for doing this is to get a better result for my own church in the search engines. When we started our website years ago I never thought about the importance of how people would find the site. Right now, the only people that ever find our main church website are people who are specifically looking for it. I want to be able to get people to the site who are searching in a more general way. The main site for the church I pastor is www.keysvineyard.com. This describes our church (Vineyard Community Church) somewhat, but never gets returned for a general search of churches in the area. If I knew then what I know now, the website would be more like the one I am starting, Florida Keys Vineyard Churches. This site will show up in searches for:
- Florida Keys Churches
- Churches in the Florida Keys
- Vineyard Churches
- Keys Churches, etc
You get the idea. Rather than change my existing site (there are some major benefits to having an established site), I am adding this site to direct traffic to my main site. I can also use it to act as a website for our video venue that is 30 miles away. It will serve as another example of how to set up a church web site, which is important to us at Church Growth Consulting.
Things to do to Start a Church Web Site
We have already discussed in previous articles the need for a web host and a domain name. I am going to assume you have dome that already. I will also assume you have read the other articles about installing plugins and the process of downloading and uploading files. It took me less than four hours to get the Florida Keys Vineyard Churches site running and looking half way decent. Here is the process.
1. With the theme installed the next thing to do is add some plugins. Plugins make the site look and function better. For this site I downloaded, uploaded and activated the following plugins:
- Akismet (spam blocker already loaded on WordPress)
- All in One SEO (makes your site more visible to the search engines)
- Contact Form 7 (used this for the contact and prayer request page)
- Easy Donation (puts a place for donations in the sidebar)
- Stat Counter (allows you to track how many people visit the site)
- WP-Upgrade (WordPress is always getting better, this plugin makes upgrading easy)
- WP-Backup (e-mails a back up of your site to you everyday, remember Jesus Saves)
- PayPal Donate (I used this on the Donate page)
- Verse of the Day (puts a new bible verse on the site everyday)
- Page Excluder (keeps certain pages off of the home page, it’s about appearance)
- Events Calendar (nice little calendar plugin for the sidebar)
- WordPress Video Plugin (allows you to show video from Youtube, Godtube, Veoh etc.)
2. The next thing you need to do is add some Pages. I added Contact, Prayer Request, Donate, Where We Are, and Media pages.
3. The theme I am using allows for the adding of some images on a timed scroll on the Home page. I used the Paint program to create images that were 530 x 260 pixels and then added them to the site. Creating the images took more than half of the four gours I needed to set up the site. I am using the images to direct traffic to the pages I want visitors to the site to go to. All the information you need to set up a church web site is available on this site, Church Growth Consulting, or on My Newbie Blog, or on the Church Web Site. If you have any questions use the Contact page and I will try and help you. A few hours of work can make all the difference in your Online Ministry.
As part of the overall web ministry package we are putting together here on the Church Growth site , I have been spending some time again working on the Church Web Site we are developing. I have found a nice theme that I think will work really well for most churches. It is a very attractive theme and will hold people’s attention. It’s also free! Here is what the site used to look like:
Here it is with the new “Massive News” theme:
To appreciate the theme you need to go and look at it. It has a scrolling feature which continuously changes the look of the site. We will use this feature to introduce the various parts of the Church Web Site we want people to visit.
The Problem with Many Church Web Sites
I have been visiting a lot of Church Web Sites lately. One of the questions you have to ask when you are thinking about your website is “Why would someone read this site”? I think that for a long time the church has often thought of a website as a place for information. Just put the times of the services, what we believe, when the picnic is, etc. Many sites that I visit haven’t been updated for a long, long time. The Church Web Site needs to looked at as an important part of the overall ministry of the church. It has potential that most churches aren’t even considering.
