Welcome to all our new Facebook fans… over 90 in less than 3 days… outstanding!
If you haven’t met me yet, my name is Patrick Steil and I just want to give a big Texas HOWDY and thanks for connecting with us… ChurchBuzz is my passion and hope you will drop me a line and introduce yourself to me… anyways, the topic for this blog post is to introduce you to the overall concept of my vision for what a church website must encompass in order to be as effective as possible.
There are 5 MAJOR points to the vision:
1. Visitors MUST be able to find the church. We all know that the #1 way people “shop” for things these days is ONLINE… so, if they are shopping churches, ARE THEY FINDING YOUR CHURCH? When was the last time you tested all the major search engines to make sure your church shows up when searching under each city / town in your area?
2. Church Websites should WELCOME VISITORS! Ok, so once you get them there, is there a very clear BUTTON or GRAPHIC that tells them “VISITORS GO HERE!”? And then do you have lots of good information about your church that is geared to the first time visitor – oh and by the way, keep in mind this may be the FIRST time that visitor is contemplating visiting ANY church – so easy on the “church speak”… 🙂
3. Church Websites must be kept up to date!. Does your church website still have a message from Easter on the homepage? That could be worse than not updating it all! When a visitor sees “current events”, they may think “wow, this church is alive”…
4. Church Websites must foster better communication – Are you using Social Media to help communicate with your members? Is your congregation using Facebook? Twitter? I bet they are… and more and more every day… Facebook is a wonderful way to communicate – but even more important is that it helps build and solidify relationships between church members! And let’s not forget about the power of emails – an email newsletter is also essential to a good communication platform.
5. Church websites need to be maintained by someone that is experienced. Is your church webmaster experienced in graphics design, content creation, search engine optimization, the integration of various tools such as facebook, twitter and other plugins and other various technology tools. Does your webmaster tweak content for search engine rankings, watching the traffic and interactions from visitors to the website/facebook page/twitter, etc. In other words, to be most effective, there is a lot of work to do and it takes advanced skills, experience and the ability to keep up with technology that is changing every few months! 🙂
Your comments: So what do you think? Are we on track? What have we missed… ? Click the “Comments” link below to add your comment now! 🙂
Patrick