So you think your church needs a website. Or a new site. Or a better site. Rock on. Welcome to Church Websites 101, a quick and dirty series about how to start or restart your church’s website.
We spent a lot of time at the beginning of this series talking about planning. We cautioned you against diving in without thinking. You need a plan and strategy in order to be successful. And that’s true.
But now that you have a plan and you know where you’re going, it’s time to get there. Quickly. Go on, get moving!
The lack of momentum is the number one thing that will kill your web project. Getting through all that planning and strategizing is going to be hard. It’s vital, but it’ll still be hard. That means when you’re ready to start your site you’re already going to be facing a serious lack of momentum. Another six months of building a site will just exhaust everyone. You’ll need a super champion to make it through.
So make it easy on yourself. Make measurable progress part of the plan. Have high-five worthy milestones in the process to build momentum and keep your team excited. Your main goal should be to get something you can show off.
Here are some ways to make sure you can get it done:
Build in Stages
Plan to build your site in stages. There’s no sense spending a year to launch a behemoth of a site. Roll out your site in phases with one piece at a time. Incremental improvements are a lot easier to maintain than doing everything at once. Just be sure to clearly set the expectations so people know what’s coming.
Start with a Single Page
Start with a single page if you have to. For many churches, a well-designed single page site would be ten times better than the bloated mess they currently call a website. And it’s way better than nothing.
One-Hour Website
Another strategy is to set a ridiculous time limit and build something within those limitations. It’s just a starting point, but a site you built in an hour could be vast improvement. Especially if did your planning right. Your team could take the all-nighter or single weekend approach. The goal is to crank something out and build excitement and momentum.
It sounds silly, but you have to plan to get it done. So many church web projects have fallen by the wayside from a lack of momentum. Don’t let yours be one of them.
More Church Websites 101:
- Check out the full series, Church Websites 101.
- Or get those resources and more in our ebook, Getting Started in Church Communication: Web Basics:
Shawn G
May 2, 2011
This was an incredibly good series. I’ve really appreciated how you broke it down into manageable chunks, and that you explained each well. It definitely has made me rethink our church’s website, and I’ve been working on updating the site we have to make it fall in line with what the mission of our church is.
Thanks so much for posting this series.
Chris
May 2, 2011
I wish our Church had followed some of these steps when building our website back in 2009. We ended up spending more than we could afford on a website for our Church and to this day we are stuck paying high monthly fees for a website which our needs are surpassing.
Jonathan Malm
May 2, 2011
Each time I work on a church website…I list everything they do and every bit of information someone would want to know…then organize…delete…rearrange…until I get 6 easy, obvious pages/sections that will make the site easy for a visitor. :)