Website Tips

Website Tips

I’ve been looking around the web at some of our Free Will Baptist websites.  (You can check them out by clicking on the “Church Links” above.)  Some are very well done. Others could use a little help. I’m hoping this series of posts will give some tips that can help the average church webmaster.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Travis Penn and I’m the pastor at Calvary Free Will Baptist Church in Salem, Illinois. For a long time I was a bi-vocational pastor serving Calvary as well as working for our local elementary school as their technology coordinator.

I enjoy working on websites and blogging. I’m not a professional by any means. The following tips in this series are just some ideas that I have found useful. I hope to improve some of my own sites with these tips as well.

If you would like to help make some of my sites better, please feel free to check them out.

I hope that you’ll post tips that have been helpful to you in the comments section as well.  Our desire as the Media Commission is to help our churches do better with media. Hopefully we can work together and everyone can improve their web presence.

For starters let’s look for the obvious. When someone visits your church website, can they find…?

1. Your Address. It’s amazing how many websites don’t have their address on the front page of their website. It’s pretty common anymore to put it in a footer; that way it’s easy to find since it shows up on all of your pages.

2. Your Phone Number. Okay, I know what you’re saying.  This is the web, shouldn’t they email me? There are still a lot of folks who want to talk on the phone, and putting your phone number on the front page of your site makes it easy for them to contact you.  And for those of you who rarely check your email, this becomes a high priority.

3. A Contact Email Address. It’s helpful to have a contact email on the front so it’s easy for people to send you a message.  A point of advice here, you may want to use an address besides your personal address. Often these contact addresses receive a lot of spam. I would encourage most people to setup a Google Apps for Your Domain account to handle something like this.   (We’ll get to this in another post)

4. Directions / Map. There are many options here, but a simple link to a map can be very helpful.

5. Service Times. What time do things start? I shouldn’t have to navigate 4 levels into your site to find out when your worship service begins. Again, just make it easy.