Tips for Building a Better Church Website

When building a church website, you want the best quality of the site to reflect the values of your church. Visitors should be able to tell that it is a church website right from the start. It should also create a good impression and give a sense of belonging to everyone who visits it. Although designing a great site isn’t easy, you have to be extra careful when developing a church website in order to create something that will make the visitors proud.

A good website should offer more information to the visitors. In an era where church websites only show the church times and the location on a single page hence looking more or less like billboards, you need to implement something different. Ensure that your site offers additional information including pictures of events or any other activity that has been carried out in recent times. Designing and building such a site isn’t easy, but it is what is required to make your efforts a success.

Give the church members a sense of belonging on the church site. Include a member section that can allow them to discuss church affairs. This feature will definitely attract more church members and make them visit the site even more often. If you need to use pictures anywhere on the site, don’t go for stock photos. Simply take photos of your church members to show the visitors how they actually look like. Even if you have their photos already, don’t use them on the website unless you get their consent. This eliminates disputes and ensures the multiply theme website reflects the values of your church members.

Not everybody who visits the website is tech savvy. Therefore, focus on making the website as simple as possible to give your visitors a good surfing experience. Ensure that it is easy to navigate and doesn’t have lots of confusing pages. It is okay to develop a website with a maximum of 20 pages. Any pages more than that could make the site bulky and difficult to navigate. For more info about web design, visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/web-design.

Your website belongs to your church, but the visitors will come from all over the world. In fact, if you need more visitors on your church websites, you have to practice good SEO. One of the simplest SEO techniques that you can implement on a church website is to inter-link the pages. While creating the links, make sure that they are relevant and informative. This way, you’ll not only get visitors, but also retain those who visit the site to get information.

How to Hire the Right Church Web Design Company

Are you looking to redesign your church website? If so, you should get a web design agency to help you. There are a number of agencies you can hire. However, before choosing a company, do some background check. Here are the things to keep in mind when hiring a web design agency.

Experience of the Agency

Consider whether the agency is experienced in making church web design. Ideally, you want to hire a company that has worked with non-profits in the past. Ask the company for a list of websites it has created in the past. By looking at the websites, you will know whether or not the agency is capable of handling your church website design project.

Cost of the Service

Find out how much you will pay for the service. If you have a small budget, you can hire a freelance web designer rather than a fully-fledged agency. Hiring freelance designers is cheaper than working with an agency. However, an agency may different departments that can provide full marketing services for your website. Check your budget to determine whether to work with a freelance designer or hire an agency.

Content Creation

Web design is more than simply coding pages for the site. It also involves creating content for the pages. Find out whether the agency will create the content for your site. This, of course, will increase your cost. If you will be creating the content on your own, ask the agency what information will be required on the website. You may also want to ask about how to optimize the content to be search engine friendly.

Website Maintenance

After the website has been created, it has to be maintained. Maintenance may involve adding or editing content, ensuring any plugins used are up to date, and so on. Find out whether the web design agency will carry out maintenance. If so, find out whether the service will come at an extra cost. Ideally, you should hire a fully-fledged online marketing agency to handle all the tasks required, from designing the website to marketing it. Visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adda-birnir/5-killer-web-design-tips-_b_4038652.html to know more about web design.

Reputation of the Agency

Finally, it’s important to choose a web design agency that has a good reputation. Choose a company that you can easily get along with during your project. The designers should be articulate with the way they work and be able to incorporate your requirements in the project.

The above are four things to keep in mind when choosing an agency for your church websites project.

Why a Church Website Should Be Created Using WordPress

For churches and other nonprofit organizations, spending a lot of money on the creating of a website doesn’t make sense. After all, the main aim of such organizations isn’t to make profits but to have a positive impact in the community. Also some of those establishments might actually lack the funds to have a customs site made.  Luckily, technology has advanced to a level where the cost of websites has greatly reduced. With content management systems like wordpress powering over a quarter of websites on the internet, the days of spending thousands of dollars to have a website made are surely over.

If your church is planning to have website church themes made, then it would be wise decision to choose wordpress. For starters, wordpress was launched in the year 2003 and has become the leading software powering websites on the internet. As of now, a quarter of all the websites you see online are made from wordpress. Moving forward, the popularity of wordpress will continue to increase.

But if you are a church member tasked with making a website for your church, it only makes sense that you do some more research before settling on the content management system to power your church web design. If you are not aware of the benefits of wordpress over other software, then the following points will enlighten you.

Easy to use

WordPress is the easiest CMS to use in the world. With wordpress, the process of adding content of your site whether it is text, video or images is quite simple. Also you can add pages, blog posts in a breeze. The wordpress backend is also straight forward and won’t take you long before you master it.

No Coding Knowledge Required

With wordpress you don’t need to know any programming language in order to use it.You can add blog posts, pages, images, videos and any kind of content without the need to edit any code. This makes it easy for any church member to operate and maintain the website. To know more about web design, visit http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/14/tech/social-media/twitter-new-design/.

Custom design

Although it is cheap to have  a wordpress site made, you’ll require some customization before your site looks like a church website. Luckily, there are plenty of p ready made church themes or templates that make it easy to set up a church website quickly. Additionally, themes are actually very affordable meaning every church or non profit can easily afford to have a website created.