First, if you don’t have a church website yet, it’s easy to get one up and running. In fact, you can start up a free website known as a wordpress blog . These site allow you to create a home page for your church very easily. You can also update these types of sites regularly with the latest church events, photos and bulletins.

The interface used to manage and add information to this type of site is as easy as using a word processor. These sites also allow the members of your congregation to contact you through the site and post news and information of their own to the site if you choose to allow them to. Instructions for operating a blog type church website are provided for free online and there is often real-person support available too.

Once your church’s website is up and running, you will no doubt want to customize the look and feel of it so that is aligned with the spirit and message of your organization. If you want to do it yourself and have the time to learn, creating a new header - the graphic image that goes at the top of every page - is a great way to start. You may want to design it with a picture of your church or town and your church’s name.

If you ask, you might find a member of your congregation who is good at creating graphics on the computer and would be happy to take on this task. They might be very happy to help out their church in this way. If not and you end up needing to hire a professional to do this, you should know ahead of time that this simple but effective customization can often be done for less than fifty dollars, including the creation of the website header and installation.

Once your site looks the way you’d like it to and you’ve created your first pages or posts with contact information for your church, your schedule and maybe some of news and photos, it is time to let your congregation know about it. If you print out a regular newsletter or bulletin that is handed out, this is a great place to print your church’s web site address or URL. Make a note encouraging members to visit the site and give you feedback to help you improve it. This information will be invaluable in helping you make your website work to its full potential.

Because blogs have many free professional looking templates available, are easy to manage, and are very fast and inexpensive to set up, they are a popular web design choice for many churches. Whether you choose a free blog, or pay for a church web design service, make sure to keep it clean and simple so your congregation can focus on the message.

Places of worship such as churches, temples and synagogues, charities supported by religious organizations and religious societies founded by members of a faith all come under the umbrella of religious institutions.

Religious institutions are now rapidly realizing the amazing power of the internet, not only to inform people about their faith, but to help convert people or to find new faith as well. The internet is proving itself as both a versatile medium and an effective marketing implement. Religious institutions are now more than ever turning to the web to attract more followers. With over 900 million internet users, religious institutions have come to understand the power of the internet.

Read Features of Church Website Design

The best option in building a church website is to hire a specialize church website design company that will cater to the client’s needs. Less headaches and fast development as they already experienced in church website design. Optimal results are feasible only if there are no budget constraints.

The second option is to hire any professional website design company. In this scenario for optimal results need good budget too.

A cheaper alternative would be “click and build” sites that are currently available on the Internet. These sites may be able to serve the purpose of a certain church. They offer an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to help build an ideal website. They also offer free trial runs, which are beneficial in evaluating how the church website fares. Finally, the church may be fortunate to have a committed member who understands the church as much as he understands the do’s and don’ts in coming up with the perfect church website. If that is the case, he may be tapped to provide insights in building the website.

Maintaining a church website definitely has its advantages. However, it has its disadvantages as well. A website can be a direct reflection of the church, and all that information about it makes it vulnerable to its detractors.

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If you ever look at church logo designs, you will actually find them very different from conventional logos. The reason is very apparent; the motive behind the logo design. Normally, companies produce eye catching and competitive logos in order to attract the public. However, this is not the case with church logo designs. Churches do not produce logos to attract public towards them but the only motive they have behind a logo design is to tell their objective to the public. As said before, church logo designs have different characteristic than logos belonging to other industries. Therefore, some basic elements of church logo designs are given below:

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I’m calling this new series Using WordPress to Run Church Websites. In this series, I want to explore how a church could use WordPress, the free blogging platform that runs this site and thousands more like it, as a cheap, easy and flexible content management system to both create a church website as well as easily maintain it.

Don’t be baffled by the phrase “content management system”(or CMS). That fancy phrase is just a way to describe online software programs that allow people to easily update websites without the use of desktop software like Adobe DreamWeaver or Microsoft FrontPage. Everything is done on the Internet using an interface that often resembles a word processor like Microsoft Word.

I tell most people that if they can operate Microsoft Word, they can use a content management system like WordPress.

Let me say at the outset of this series that I think WordPress is NOT a good alternative for all churches to use to run their main website. In fact, WordPress is designed primarily to create and maintain blogs. BUT it is flexible enough with lots of functionality to also run a primary website.

And I DO believe it could be an easy and affordable solution for the thousands of small- to medium-sized churches out there struggling to maintain or even create an Internet presence.

Because I use WordPress for the websites I design, I thought this might be a good tutorial series for those churches to walk through. So in this series, I’m going to share with you some of the tweaks and lessons I’ve learned with using this powerful program to run a small church website and how to leverage it for greater exposure for your church.

At times this will get technical, I apologize beforehand for it, but I will endeavor to keep this as simple as possible. Along the way, if you have questions or ideas for posts, please send me an email.

So without further ado, let the series begin.

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