Page Content:
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The most important part of your website is its content: the information it contains about your church in the form of pictures and words describing your mission and activities. We can’t create a website for you without content, but we also don’t have to knowledge to create it for you. The best persons to create content for the website are the staff and members of the church; these folks will always know a church best.
Please keep in mind that creating all of the content for a website is too much for one person to do. To that end, we have some suggestions that we believe will make this process as smooth and pain free as possible.
First, we have suggested template material that should provide a guide, making content creation much easier. You can just write topics based on our suggested pages and include the suggested key information guests are looking for. Here’s a link to our guidelines: Internet Outreach Experts Suggested Pages.
Second, we strongly recommend that you split this work up among the leaders at your church. The chair of the missions board is probably the one to provide the core information for the page on missions, the youth person for the page on youth, and so on. Feel free to share the template material with your leaders. It’s usually a good idea to have one person who’s a good written communicator to edit all of the content so that the site has a consistent “voice”, however one person trying to write all of the content for the site usually creates a bottleneck.
Lastly, we encourage you to look for material that has already been written. Ideally, you may have a former website whose content just needs to be spruced up or rewritten. Other items to consider are brochures, newsletter articles, mission statements and so on. Please keep in mind that the main purpose of your website is to help a guest make the decision to visit your congregation, so using reports or minutes meant only for internal consumption is probably counterproductive.
A few best practices to keep in mind:
- In order to have an idea of the formatting you’d like to use, we request that you provide content as a Word document or .rtf file. You can upload these files below or email them with the page title and additional graphics (if any) to your support email.
- It is a great idea to use authentic images of your ministries and people on your website, particularly when reaching out to Millennials. We can format those images for you so that they will look good on a particular page, but we need to know which picture you want on which page.
- Please check this content for accuracy, as you are the only ones able to catch factual errors (we don’t know your church like you do!).