These articles, specialising in content writing, social media, design considerations and churches and Wordpress are all drawn from my years of experience working with churches in the web design field and thinking about the special challenges and issues exist.
When I was first learning how to do this web design thing (not that you can ever really stop learning), I was always interested to see what sort of tools other people were using to do their work. I started off seven years ago using a moderately OK Windows PC, a cheap and outdated version of Adobe Photoshop and a free text editor – and very little idea what I was doing.
Since those bad days, I have gone through three operating systems, two new computers and have finally bought an up-to-date version of Adobe Creative Suite. However, I’m still fundamentally a curious person when it comes to technical things, so I thought someone else might also be interested in the sort of tools I am using to do my work.
This, therefore, is part one of a run-down of my current toolkit!
You have spent the last three months in meeting after meeting, discussing different designs, key messages and stories and content items for your church website. You have finally reached the point where you are ready to launch your website – but you are missing one vital key of the puzzle: somewhere to upload and store your website so that others can access it: you are missing a web host.
The world of web hosting can seem to be full of lots of scary, intimidating and confusing terminology. You might be getting in a mess wondering why you need 500 different software packages (you don’t) and whether you need to be getting a qualification in zoology the web hosting package comes with Python (which, it turns out, is actually a programming language).
Therefore, allow me to present the basic, beginners guide to church website hosting. Quite simply, I have listed some of the key terms you need to know, what they mean and what you should be looking for. If it’s not here, unless you have special requirements for your websites, you can probably feel free to ignore it!
There is a grave error on church websites which gives me a deep unrest in my spirit, and it is calling me to cry out mightily to the Lord that he should stretch out his mighty hand in vindication to redeem and restore. This error is the use of Christianese (Christian-exclusive jargon) on church websites. These weird and wacky words appear in our belief pages, in pages describing what and who the church is and even in our notices.
Now, as a theology student, I have no problem in principle with technical theological words. Indeed, we need technical words in order to talk concisely and precisely about what God – trying to talk about the Trinity in a theology essay without words like procession, begotten, indwelling, personhood, immanent and transcendent would make for both very bloated and unclear reading (and heaven forbid theologians got a name for being unclear!).
However, that’s not the task we are doing on our church websites. If we are doing our job correctly when we are making a church website, we should be telling people who maybe have no familiarity with church about who God is, what he has done and what it means for them, us as a community and for the whole world.
We should be speaking good news – and good news is only seen as good when it is understood (and 1 Corinthians 1 suggests that understanding the good news can be hard enough work without bad writing getting in the way!).
Here’s my suggestion of a few common Christianese pitfalls in church content writing and how to avoid them.
Church websites are great fun to make. Of course, I would be expected to say such things because I make my living out of carefully crafting hand-coded church websites and giving birth to a visual feast that brings to life ideas, communities, projects and churches.
However, even if you’re not someone who is professionally working in this field – or if you are someone who is about to start working alongside a web designer – church websites are great fun. There is a sense of energy and excitement as you embark on the process of making something. You see things in the world you never used to: colours, shapes, words.
It can all become a little bit of a drug.
That’s why it’s important to take some time before you start actually making anything to plan and define the scope of the project. One of the most important questions is: how do we know when we have a successful church website? What says that we have succeeded?
The topic of accessibility is, quite rightly, becoming ever more important. More and more clients are coming to me and, in the process of talking about how we can come up with the perfect website for them, they ask the question “and this will be widely accessible, won’t it?“.
The definition of accessibility is also changing, in my opinion. An accessible website used to just have to be accessible to visually impaired people with screen readers. Nowadays, however, we need to have our websites available for a variety of devices and screen sizes, including Android phones and tablets, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Blackberrys, traditional screen readers . . . and the list goes on.
I applaud and welcome this new enthusiasm for accessibility. After all, surely the idea of having a website that is accessible to as many people as possible is a gospel imperative – we should try and remove any barrier that stands in the way of people hearing the good news. Plus, a lot of what is good accessibility advice is just good code and good manners.
However, there are still some common problems that I see all over the place (and which I have no doubt been guilty of many times in the past). Some of these problems are old, some are new as a result of developing technology. I share them here in the hope that together we can covenant to avoiding them in the future and work towards a more accessible, welcoming future.
Search engine optimisation has become an area of dark arts on the internet, inhabited by ‘SEO gurus’ who wear long flowing robes, attend conferences with strange names and dispense advice from on high. Add into this situation that a lot of people are still getting their advice from what worked in 1998 and you have a strange, toxic situation of bad advice and fatal SEO errors that could be seriously damaging your church website’s chances in Google.
That is why this post is essential: it could save you from falling into a search engine pitfall. If you are in charge of content or programming for a church website, you need to read this.
Many churches are confused or worried about the idea of putting images on church websites. They’re not sure about what quality the images should be, what format the images should be or what the images should be of.
This short and simply guide aims to take the mystery out of the subject of church website images and give you confidence to make photos and pictures work powerfully for you.
I have grown up and chosen to spend my adult life so far in evangelical churches. I love this branch of God’s family and could not see myself anywhere else. However, this experience means that I have learnt on very clear truism about Christianity: there are three topics that it is forbidden to talk about in church. This Unholy Trinity is Girls, Gold and Glory.
The moment that you mention one of these topics, people get very uneasy and shift uncomfortably in their seats. Therefore the following blog post is, in many ways, the evangelical equivalent of groping a girl behind the bike sheds at break time: I am going to talk about money. Fasten your seat belts, it is going to be steamy.
One of the ways I see my job as a web designer is helping to support the wider Church find ways to use the internet successfully and effectively to further the mission of God. Therefore, in addition to jobs that are explicitly paid, I love spending time writing and thinking about ways to make it easier for churches to make great websites.
That is why I am very excited to announce the latest project I have been working on: Easy Sermon.
In my experience, one of the things that churches particularly struggle with is finding an effective and easy way to upload and manage sermons on their websites. This is even more true when it comes to generating a podcast feed from these sermons for listening in programs like iTunes.
When I get people coming to me and asking for a website, one of the areas I focus on in the preliminary questions are specific things that they will measure the success of the website against.
In particular, I ask about specific user actions that will show that the website has met its goals – this could be registering for a newsletter, sending an email, going onto a particular page, following a twitter account or downloading a sermon.
The idea behind this is that a website exists to fulfil specific purposes and meet specific goals – it’s not just simply a static noticeboard or a random collection of musings. Rather, it is there to communicate a certain kind of information in a certain kind of way that will lead to a certain kind of action.
