Christian blog about church website design
Click to go back to the site, to the collection of free Christian website templates and our nice church website design.Build trust and the rest will follow
I have just posted an article on another site of mine about what is the most important feature of an ecommerce site and because it really connects to this field, Christian websites, I have decided to write about it here as well.
The fact is that it is not about ecommerce websites, it works great with Christian websites also, and with all types of websites out there. It works, because the most important feature of a site is not the look, not the most shiny template, not the most expensive engine, but the most important feature of a website is the level of trust you manage to transmit to your visitors. It works with ecommerce because you have there a measurable target, but it also works fine with all kinds of websites, because, even if you don’t realize, each site has a target. Like a Christian website, for example, the target could be to bring more people closer to God, to church, to faith. Isn’t this one of the greatest goals? Like another site I have, www.exersaucers.net that I am trying to build right now, exersaucer oriented, where I do my best to have an open relationship with my readers.
For this, people need to trust you and the site. People need to understand you are a real person behind the site, you need to understand that a site is a virtual world and the human touch sometimes is not there as it should be.
Maybe you are into blogging, well, in that case you should ask yourself why bloggers have so much success.It is because of the human touch most blogs transmit. A blog represents people, more than a regular, static website, so people will easily connect to a blog, because they understand the real people behind the site and will connect to them. It is all about trust, after all.
So, in order to have a successful site you need to build trust. That’s all it takes!
How about if I simplify the process of uploading free templates?
These days I keep on thinking about how to simplify the process of you sending templates to be published on this site. It should be as easy as possible, but so far I have understood from you that the process doesn’t seem straight forward, considering the fact that you need to register before sending anything.
The fact is that I prefered this because all the templates are displayed under a certain user credentials, the designers has the right to add and edit templates. But I just ask myself if it wouldn’t be easier to just let you send templates without any other data needed. No account, no nothing, just send the design you want.
I think that this way, the collection of Christian templates will grow easier than so far, because more of you will send free templates here.
What do you think, would it be better?
Religious website templates started to be a pretty crowded market
Well, yes, this is what I have observed in the last period of time, people look for religious website templates every day and more and more websites started to provide church templates and other Christian resources. Day by day, more websites get buit and give free religious templates.
This is a good thing since more and more people can find what they are looking for, more and more people can build their religious websites using free website templates downloaded from the internet.
However you need to ask yourselves about the quality pof such templates, given the fact that the number starts to be high and as you may know, the more you have, the less quality you get. But OK, being a lot, you can pick a few good religious templates from there and this is good.
2 easy ways to make your Christian website grow
One of the best advices I have heard about how to make a site grow is to make it useful and easy to spread and people will grow it. Well, doesn’t work just like this, but it helps a lot. Imagine you have a Christian site, well, you probably have already if you are here looking for some free Christian templates, and you want to grow it day by day. Then you would need to have an easy way to spread on the internet and the solution would be to have on each post a “send to a friend” option so whoever finds your site useful to send it easily to whoever might be interested. This way, without doing any effort, you can have your site promoted by your users wherever you wouldn’t expect.
Also, have the possibility to send your site to social media sites. If you have a free web template that you want to go public, just add buttons for voting it on Digg, on StumbleUpon and people with the same interests as you, religious websites will vote it. These are just 2 possbilities to make your site grow. Think about them!
Internet activity for Christian websites increases at this time of the year
Now that the summer is gone, I see that people came back and traffic is increaqsing, it is that autumn increase that we all love! Especially myself and my websites! The fact is that it depends from topic to topic, but the same thing applies to almost all websites, no matter they are Christian websites or not.
Over summer time, the internet activity slowly decreases and internet businesses also decrease over summer time, but now everything is back to normal, people start working on their websites again, they start promoting, start looking for web templates to build their websites, everything is better.
That is why, to all of you coming back to the internet at this time of the year, I just want to say Welcome back! It would be interesting to ask yourself how is your topic of the website doing, how it fluctuates over the year. If you have never asked yourself that question, ask yourself now and you may understand why your traffic goes a bit down over the summer.
How to build a community of Christian web designers?
As I said this before, one of the things that really run through my head is how to make this site more of a community, so everybody contribute to it. I think that if everybody would contribute to it, it would grow easier, the collection of Christian web templates would grow easier and more and more people will come to this site to download free templates.
If you have any ideas about how to make this community grow, I would be more than happy to listen to you!
How difficult is to build a Christian web template?
Well, belileve me or not, it is not an easy thing to do. If you build a custom theme, without a particular constraint, such as a particular engine, CMS or an already established site, it is easier, your imagination is the limit, but if you need to respect some constraints such as building a religious blog theme based on WordPress or a Christian osCommerce template, or a Zen Cart template, etc, then things will be a bit more difficult because you will have some particular structures that you need to include and respect, like for ex blog posts, archives, you need to include tags for best offers, etc.
These days more and more people use predefined CMS engines such as WordPress so Christian WordPress themes are very demanded these days and designing them is not easy to to. What you can do to start working on one is to take the default theme WordPress comes with and start adapting it.
I guess that no matter in what domain of activity you work on, you know that is always easier to adapt somebody’s work than to start it yourself from scratch. The same with Christian WordPress themes here…
Christian announcements were invaded by spam
One of the areas that I really like on this site is the Christian announcements area, because it is interractive, people get to submit their announcements, it is that easy. But at one moment I had to close that area down due to high number of spams, meaning fake announcements with adult content.
So I closed it at that moment, but I always felt sorry for this since I really loved that part. A few days ago I reopened it, without enhancing it in any waym hoping that the submit form was forgotten by spammers. Well, not quite since I have started to receive spam announcements again. That is something I don’t like…
I think I will spend some time to add a captcha there so people be forced to answer a question or something similar, in order to not send spam comments.
Back to website design and to my Christian website
It’s been a while since I haven’t writen anything on this blog, since I was busy for a period and in holiday for another period, when, despite the fact that I had more free time, I spent it everywhere else but in front of my computer.
Now I am back to blogging about website design and open source web templates, about what means to design a Christian website and how to promote such a website. You know, after a long period of time spent away from your websites sometimes you don’t know where to start your work when you get back to your computer. What should you do first? What should you start writing about?
Personally I have a few projects in my mind that I would like to start and a few more that I try to finish. I wish I only had enough time on my hands to do this.
One of the next projects that I would like to start is a website dedicated to premium WordPress themes only. It is one of my goals since a long time but I never manage to put it online. I hope to find the time for it.
I will keep you posted!
Church website design is a lovely activity
Indeed, I find church website design as a very pleasant thing to do, since I get to design a lot of websites, a lot of church website templates and this makes every day of my life more and more beautiful. You know, you need passion for this activity in order to make it right. It is not just a regular website design niche, you need more for it, you need understanding, trust, faith, love and a very good communication with your client who, in most of the cases, has so little to do with computers.
Church website design is not hard to do once you understand it and manage to communicate right with the people asking you for services. If you are not used to it, if you are not used to design Christian websites, for example, it is difficult to do it in the beginning until you master the vocabulary and needs. Christian websites and church website design in general are different than regular sites, you will need to spend time in the church, among people of the church, if you are not very familiar with it, in order to get it right.
That is why I recommend you start developing the website of your church with a Christian designer who already understand these needs.