Archive for Church Web Master Advice
Starting a Church Website – Part 5
Posted by: | CommentsWhile our goal on Church Web Master is to be your church webmaster online, we also provide information to help people become church webmasters. In this series of articles we have been chronicling the development of a church site, “Key West Vineyard Community Church“. We have walked you through the process of getting a domain name and a web host. We have talked about how to choose a theme and how to install plugins. We have hopefully encouraged you to take some risks and get comfortable in working with WordPress.
Our Key West Vineyard Community Church site is now very close to being complete. We have added some of the finishing touches that make a site functional. All of the important information about the church is available on the front page. This includes the times of the services, phone number, address, and a map to the church. We have added some pictures do that people who visit the church after visiting the website will have an immediate connection. We have started a church blog. We have also linked to some other websites by RSS which provide constant fresh content to the site. Here are a couple of screen shots of the site today:
The site has also been indexed by Google and is showing up on the search engines. It is currently in position 2 of page 1:
In our next phase of development of the site we will begin to utilize the blog to get the site to show up on more general Google searches. We will try to get the site to show up as a result for “Key West Churches” and “Churches in Key West”. This process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it is an important part of being a church webmaster.
Beyond the Traditional Church Website
Posted by: | CommentsThere are tremendous opportunities to impact the Kingdom of God on the Internet. We want to encourage you to use your holy imagination and ask God for ideas about how you might be able to start your own Internet based ministry. Over time, there is the possibility that ideas you have originally can evolve into other ideas. The thing to do is to get started, particullarly when it comes to the Internet. Most websites don’t get noticed by search engines very well until they have been around a while. For your Internet ministry to really be successful you will need to attract people to your site by way of the search engines.
As your ideas evolve you can make changes to your site to implement the new ideas. For example, some time ago we started a site called “Evangelism Software”. The original idea was to try and capitalize on a keyword that has pretty good traffic and see if we could use that traffic to generate some Google Adsense revenue. The reality was, however, that even after getting the site up to position 1 on page 1, it never got any significant Google Adsense participation. We decided to just let the site sit for a while. This is how it looked at the time.
It turns out, that besides Evangelism Software, a secondary keyword we had on the site began to get some traffic. That keyword set is “Start a Christian Blog”. Having people start blogs and websites to impact the Kingdom of God is the foundation of what we do on the Church Webmaster Network of sites. So while our initial idea wasn’t so hot, the site now has a newer and more noble purpose. We have gone back and given the site a face lift and are now actively targeting the “Start a Christian Blog” traffic. The goal is no longer a monetary one, it has more of a ministry focus. The new site looks like this:
The site is currently in position 3 for “start a Christian blog” and position 2 for “evangelism software”. We will continue to develop the site so that it beomes position 1 for both keyword sets. The site will then not only function in its new ministry roll, it will also help people to other sites in our network.
