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Church Website Best Practices - Entries from May 2008

ThuThursdayMayMay1st2008

Posted Thursday, May 01 2008 @ 8 AM byDave McCall Tagged Best Practices for Church Websites 0 comments Add comment

We believe strongly that your church website can be a great tool for your ministry and help fulfill your ministry goals. As we've discussed before, two of the strongest contributions your site might make are:

To connect new people with your ministry
To help current visitors/attendees/members find new ways to "plug in"

Generally, people will visit your website looking for something specific. Let's call this "what they think they want."

For someone who hasn't attended, this might be the service times or your statement of belief.
For a current attender, this might be the times of that prayer meeting or the e-mail address of one of your pastors.
For the member, this might be pictures of last weekend's retreat or your worship music archive.

But each of these visits also represents an opportunity for you to give them "what you think they need to know. Don't miss these opportunities.

When the potential attender looks for service times, why not also show them how to become a believer, information about the new believer's class, and a link to a welcome letter or video from your pastor?
When a current attender comes to find out about the prayer meeting, why not offer her some information about your membership classes?
When a member comes to see pictures, why not show him a volunteer posting for next year's retreat?

Your iMinistries website has what we call highlights. Highlights are simply "slots" in the margins of a page where you can place a sort of mini-ad for another item on your site. Each highlight shows the item's thumbnail, the title, and a brief summary. Each page can have up to five highlights. Highlights can be explicitly selected or you can have the system present a random highlight on the page.

Highlights are great for "filling out a page," but their more important goal is to direct visitors to other potentially interesting content. This is, after all, one of the distinct advantages to the Web as a communication vehicle--users can and will click around to see more information. We track the use of highlights in our sites, and we've found that, when they are presented, users click them. Are you using them?

ThuThursdayMayMay1st2008

Kossuth Street Baptist Church

Posted Thursday, May 01 2008 @ 8 AM byTravis Hickox Tagged Custom Quote 0 comments Add comment

"I'd like to say thanks to Travis and his team their for their brilliant web communications tool. We're in the beginning phases of implementing this tool for our church, but it is definitely going to change how our church communicates with its membership and external audiences. This single tool has shifted our communications from a rigid top down structure (i.e. church leadership to membership) to a more open, flexible, horizontal structure that empowers key ministry personnel and lay-leaders throughout the church to communicate directly, increasing communication speed and accuracy. More importantly, this tool will help ease the burden on key full-time staff.

http://kossuthstreetbaptistchurch.com/

"I am also extremely thankful for iMinistries’ robust suite of built-in communications tools--blogs, e-newsletters, forms/registrations, photo galleries, podcasting, shopping carts, and much more--all for one convenient price based on your church's size. As a vice president of a marketing communications firm that develops complex web sites for a living, I discovered I couldn't have my team develop a package from scratch, like iMinisties, for any less than $20,000 (far beyond the reach of my church’s web budget). For the price, the iMinistries tool is by far and away the best deal going.

"I also, found the iMinistries site is completely scalable to suit our church’s needs. So, we can grow the site both vertically and horizontally as well turn web features (i.e. blogs, galleries, newsletters, etc.) on AND off as our church sees fit.

"Best of all, thanks to iMinistries WYSIWYG content editing system – our church can maintain a relationship-building presence on the web without having a full-time web guru on staff. The content interface is very, very similar to a popular word processor, so populating and updating site content is a breeze. iMinistries even offers an array of how-to videos and searchable FAQs to assist even the most novice of users. But in the few instances I required deeper support, the iMinistries team was never anymore than an e-mail away.

"I could go on and on about the power and affordability of the iMinistries’ tool. However, I’ll just leave it here for now."

Earl N. Borron
Vice President/Creative Director
Haan Marketing+Communications

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Church Website Best Practices - Entries from May 2008

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