Building an Online Ministry – Part 1
We are going to build a complete online ministry together, incorporating a church web site, a pastor’s blog, outreach components, in-reach components, and all the bells and whistles. If it seems a little overwhelming, don’t worry, it’s all about perspective. We can make a little thing out of a big thing by walking you through the process stap by step. If you need a little extra help we can provide you with that as well. To get the project started I went to Good News Domains and purchased a domain name. The domain name I settled on was www.webministryonline.com. I paid $9.69 for the domain name. I could put together the complete online web ministry and never spend more than $9.69 a year. Good news Domains offers a free hosting service, but you have to deal with some advertising at the top of the site. I am going to take advantage of the free hosting for now, but later will probably upgrade. Even then I can choose an option for between five and nine dollars a month so the cost is really minimal. If you would like to read about getting a domain name I wrote an article about starting a blog on my evangelism site, My Newbie Blog. In that article you will get step by step instructions for getting your own domain name.
Web Ministry Online (www.webministryonline.com)
Why did I choose Web Ministry Online for the domain name? I am glad you asked. First, I was looking for a domain name that would fit well with what I wanted to accomplish. In order to set up all the various aspects of a web ministry I am going to take advantage of the sub domains that I can use with my web hosting. Rather than have to keep purchasing domain names and getting them web hosted, I can add sub-domains for free. So I will be adding a sub-domain for the church web site. It will be something like Christian Community Church. The URL for the sub-domain will then be http://christiancommunitychurch.webministryonline.com. The Pastor’s blog will be something like http://pastorsteves.webministryonline.com. The youth group could have their own sub-domain. I will link the various sites together but each one will also act as a stand alone site.
Secondly, I also wanted a domain name that would search well on Google. That way I can generate some traffic from outside the church. “Web Ministry”, “Ministry Online” will be the keywords we will focus on as we write articles for the main site. With the sub-domain sites we will target keywords like, “pastors ministry online” or “church ministry online”. The domain name provides us with a lot of flexibility.
Thirdly, if we need to, we can purchase a domain name for the church and point it at the sub-domain site we create. This way we only have to pay another $10 a year and people can use a URL that is easier than http://christiancommunitychurch.webministryonline.com. This Church Growth site operates as a sub-domain of my main web ministry site Internet Pastor Online. The actual URL for this site is http://churchgrowthsoftwareconsulting.internetpastoronline.com. No one would ever type that in. Most of the people that come to this site find it as the result of a keyword search and so the domain name being that long isn’t that important. I did however purchase a domain name www.churchgrowthblog.com which is easy to remember and which points to this site. Here is what the site looks like now. In our next article we will create some sub-domains and install some themes.
