The Important Info on Church Web Sites
Kevin Bettinger
Here are answers to the questions you presented. Feel free to contact me for any other information you need.
1. Why is it important that a church maintain a good, up-to-date web site?
You may or may not know that in your average community, people looking for a church are checking out local church websites first. If they don’t find your website, those potential visitors may not drop in for a visit. If they DO find your website, are they impressed enough to visit? It really boils down to a quality experience in so many cases.
While first impressions are important, that’s not where you want to end the experience with your web visitors. Your website is too valuable a tool to simply be used for a brief marketing encounter. Take advantage of your site to help keep your members connected between Sundays, and include the social applications to help you do that.
You need a website that makes the right first impression and that inspires site visitors into thinking, “Hey, we might want to try this church out.”
2. What does your company offer that would make it stand out from the others?
The combination of features, design and affordability make it a tough value to beat. Here are some other great reasons to choose FaithConnector:
1. Power: Our church websites come loaded with features and applications, but you can decide which ones you want to use. All of our features come with either of our plans, so you don’t have to pay extra for the features you want. We’re always adding to the list, and more is on the way.
2. Control: You have 100% control over your website content. You can also allow anyone you approve to make changes to your website. You don’t have to rely on outside programmers and webmasters to help you maintain your church website anymore.
3. Scalability: A FaithConnector site can grow as large as you want it to grow. We don’t put limits on the number of pages you can have, because we have a unique hosting situation and can spread our customers over many high-performance web servers. Also, we built our content management system completely inhouse, so we can expand it as needed.
4. Reliability: FaithConnector websites are hosted in a world-class hosting center with 24/7/365 monitoring, daily backups, and redundant connections. Our datacenter promises us 100% uptime, but we’re very cautious, and only promise the industry standard 99.99+% uptime. This is important in this day and age when you might be relying on email and web to get the Word out.
5. Appearance: Our websites look AWESOME! We have designers inhouse creating designs, which allows us to lease them so affordably. All library designs are customized. We also offer great custom designs.
6. Flexibility: A FaithConnector website is designed to fit your ministry’s needs, whatever
those may be. Whether you want an informational site, a community-building website or a blog or data-driven news hub, just tailor the site yourself in the site manager. You choose what applications you want to use.
7. Affordability: A FaithConnector website costs little to start up and as little as $54/month, which is the plan most of our customers choose. There is no additional cost for our great tech support! PLUS, all product features come with the $54 plan, so unless you need more than 2GB of storage space, that will suit you just fine. We also do NOT charge based on congregation size or number of pages or for additional applications or email accounts, etc.
8. Support: The FaithConnector staff is very friendly and incredibly knowledgable about our product. They’re always glad to help in anyway, including listening to new ideas to make the product even better. PLUS, there are NO additional costs for tech support, and we pick up the phone when you call.
9. Christian-Owned and Staffed: As a church, you primarily want a great website. However, we hope you’ll also be glad to know that we’re Christian-owned and staffed and always thinking about how we can make your ministry more powerful on the web. All of the churches of our staff members use FaithConnector sites, so we’re not just developers, but also users!
10. FREE Application Upgrades For Life!: All FaithConnector website customers receive product application upgrades as they are developed – FREE. These upgrades might very well include some of your own ideas.
11. NO RISK!: We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee that isn’t offered much in this industry. But, we believe you’ll be so happy with your new website and our great support that you’ll merely wish you’d found us sooner!
3. What, in your opinion, are the most important elements of a good church web site?
– Tells who you are, where you are, and when you meet.
– Easy to navigate. Clear heirarchy of information.
– Easy access to media.
– Updated often with new information. Home page should point visitors toward what’s new and what’s important.
– Uses current coding conventions to ensure cross-browser/cross-system compatibility.
– Light-weight both visually (lots of white-space, proper type leading) and in file-size (better load times = better experience).
– Should be user-oriented.
4. How can a church best keep their web site current, fresh, and up to date?
Many ministries have trouble keeping their sites updated or maintaining a staff who can do it. You need an easy to use content management system (cms), that enables anyone you approve within your church to help manage your website. It should be easy to add, update and delete pages, blogs, photo galleries, calendar items and many other types of content. The system should be intuitive, requiring no programming skill, so even basic computer users can manage or contribute to the site.
The above article, “The Important Info on Church Web Sites” is written by Kevin Bettinger. The material was used with permission from the author via email.
The material is copyrighted and should not be reprinted under any other name or author. However, this material may be freely used for personal study or research purposes.
