Need a New Church Website but don’t know where to begin

Here are 10 Key Things to Consider:

1. What is your intended launch date for the new site? Are there any special

events or considerations that may affect the schedule (for example:

conference, special meetings,?

2. Do you have an approximate number of pages for your site.

3. What email address would you like requests for more information by site

visitors sent to?

4. What are the main reasons you are redesigning or creating a new site?

(for example: is your site outdated site or do you have no site at all)

5. What are your primary online goals for the site? Do you have any

secondary goals? Discuss both long and short-term objectives with your team.

6. Do you have a plan in place to measure whether or not your site is

successful in meeting its goals? By what criteria will you judge your site’s

success?

7. How important is it to maintain your current look and feel, logo, and

branding?

8. Use a few adjectives to describe how the user should perceive the new

site. (Ex: warm, friendly, conservative, traditional, fun, forward-thinking,

innovative, cutting edge, excitement etc.) Is this different than current

image perception?

9. How are you currently perceived offline? Do you wish to carry

through the same kind of message through your web site?

10. make a list of sites you find compelling. What specifically do you like

about these sites?

Dear Colleagues
During the week of June 22nd to June 26th we will be completing a system upgrade to all our client sites.
We do this periodically during the year to ensure that your site is operating on the latest technology in order to serve your needs appropriately.
During this period, there will be no interruption to your site service, however to ensure that there is a smooth transition, we will be performing no site updates or amendments to projects during this period.
Our normal service will resume at 9am on Monday 29th of June.

Have an excellent week and God Bless.

From time to time we have to fix errors that occur on the homepages of some our clients’ sites that are to do with the news or events not showing properly. Instead of the content, there is an error message instead – it’s not sightly, but what our clients don’t realise is that the code they are pasting into WordPress from Microsoft Word is actually the culprit!

Microsoft Word is a great word processor, but as soon as you start trying to mix it with Internet based pages or HTML, things start to get a bit dodgy pretty quickly! The trouble is that when you paste Word code into an HTML web-page, it carries with it a lot of code that you can’t see that is intended to preserve the formatting you have made in Word. Unfortunately, this code is usually very messy and not at all useful or efficient.

We don’t want you to have to stop using MS Word though – that’s no solution. Thankfully, WordPress actually contains a feature to get round this problem.

The Paste As Plain Text button (1 – image below) is tucked away on the second row of formatting buttons within the WordPress text editor.  If you can’t see the second row, you can expand it by clicking the button third from the right that looks like rows of little coloured blocks.

This will reveal a host of useful formatting tools that we’ll go over in another post. For now, we just need to highlight the Paste As Plain Text button – it looks like a clipboard with a small ‘T’ by it.  (2 – below)

Now you can copy your content from Word, then add a new post as normal in Wordpress, and paste the code as plain text – none of Word’s horrible mess will be brought with it and you can format it within Wordpress as you need to.

Here’s a few tips to help you get the most out of your blog and keep your visitors coming back to your site for more.

Use the features of your site as much as possible.

Rather like charity, publicity begins at home….. It begins with you.

Drive traffic to your site by publishing your web address everywhere you can. Include it on your church brochures, bulletins, business cards, and other printed material. Add a signature containing your church web address and telephone number to all of your e-mail messages if you haven’t done so already. Include your web address on your recorded voice mail messages and encourage your team to promote it to those who call. And, of course, point your congregation to your site whenever possible during announcements.

Our Top 3 suggestions are:

• Post your latest sermons, news, and photos of your special events
• Use your calendar as the master calendar for your ministry
• Regularly publish up-to-date content