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.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.
A lot of Christian blogger templates
Well, if you are a Christian blogger and you are looking for quality and free blog templates, then you are in the right place! Our blog templates collection offers whatever a Christian blogger needs in order to start his or her blog!
We have a nice collection of Christian blogger templates that we are trying to expand day by day and we also rely on your support to expand it. If you have a free theme that you would like to share with us, we will be happy to publish it on our site and share it with everybody interested in it, in Christian websites or just general web design.
Also, if you want to have your own Christian blog theme you can just download one of our themes and customize it yourself. It is not that difficult once you start getting on it, you just need to learn a few things, to read the tutorials you can find on blog sites, mainly on WordPress and experiment with it. If you save a copy of the theme you have just downloaded, there is nothing you should fear about, nothing can be broken that isn’t replaceable. So, just experiment!
Do you think religious tattoos and Christian web design have anything in common?
A few days ago I was thinking if I should also provide some free religious tattoos here on MT. I am still asking myself if there is any common point between people interested in religious tattoos and people interested in free Christian designs.
The fact is that I don’t know many thing about tattoos, Christian or not, so it would be a very interesting thing to learn about. There are so many things to study and learn that I am very excited about it, after all, it is another domain where art and religion get together.
How many people with religious tattoos do you actually know?
I have seen people wearing cross tattoos, flower and cross, Jesus tattoos, but not many, indeed. This may also be because I am not into them, for the moment, maybe this is the reason, I guess if you are interested and looking around, you will see way more people.
It’s like when I wanted to buy a car, in the beginning I was not that impressed by a particular car and didn’t see too many on the street, but when actually becoming interested in it, I have started to look around and saw so many…
So, who knows, I will look around to see people wearing Christian tattoos!
Ups and downs of a Christian website
Today I decided to speak about how a Christian website gets and loses visitors over the period of one year. Yes, it is an interesting topic, even if at a first glance you may not understand what’s all about. The fact is that in most of the cases, a Christian site is not “interesting” through the entire year. In some periods it is more interesting to public while in others it is not very searched for and this interest curve follows the general interest curve. Ask yourself how much are you willing to give to faith, work during the hot season, when people are more interested in swimming, sun, holidays.
The fact is that personally, I have observed, after a few years, that traffic is getting down at the end of May, getting back on regular for a short while, then getting lower again at the end of August, after that, traffic gets high again, for the autumn when there is the best possible traffic, to only drop at the end of December, when actually all the sites are getting some heavy traffic. It is interesting, but at the same time I guess explainable since in the holiday season, people is in most of the cases more interested in getting things done for the holidays than in searching for Christian web templates.
Think about this and tell me how do you see your website over one year period? Did you experience such phases? I guess you did also, isn’t it?
How to make a site grow
These last days I kept on thinking about what should I do to create a community here.
Theory on what to do to grow a site
From the point of view of how to make a site popular, theory is simple: make it useful, easy to use and send to others and in time it will grow. Well, that’s the theory, indeed. How about the practical side of this story? I started to analyze these last days MT site and ask myself what could I do to make it more useful and easy to use? How could I make it user driven instead of being run by me?
Make the site useful. Period.
I think that the first answer I could think of about making it useful is to have more web templates published for free and the only way I could do this is to have people submitting such free website templates to be published, because without support from people all around the internet, it is not easy to grow.
Get help
So, in my opinion, the first thing I should do it to make more designers submit their work. This way, the collection of free religious templates will grow and the site itself will become more and more useful. Right? This is what I think about as a first step then, I will operate some changes(actually enhancements) on how the site operates, so you, as a user of this site to find the templates easier. When there will be more templates, there will be more difficult to find them. So I am thinking about a rating system, selection by author, by downloads, etc. I will see…
I also have other ideas, I wish I only have the necessary time for this since changes require time and this is something I don’t have much on my hands lately!
Using WordPress as a CMS
One of the most interesting things I have noticed lately is the fact that people consider WordPress a blogging platform only. Oh, what a great mistake! WordPress has an other hidden face, the face of a real CMS, able to power up static websites. I know because I build websites using WordPress as CMS.
It is not difficult at all, if you think about it! The only thing you should do is to create the pages you want and assign one as the index page, then edit a bit your WordPress theme and remove the area where categories or archive are displayed. It is that simple and it works fine.
WordPress is a powerful CMS and it can be customized to the point where you can not tell it is a WordPress engine behind it. Maybe only the fact that the URL have the WordPress format, without the file name and extension at the end of the URL, for the rest, you can not tell what is behind it.
This is a great feature, if you think about it, because it empowers you to develop websites fast and easy without spending time on developing the website engine and this is great when it comes to productivity, one of the things you should always consider when starting a business.
Think about it and next time when you want to start a website consider WordPress as a CMS and not as a blogging platform!
How about providing free templates for religious tattoos?
I was thinking these last days, when I started to speak about religious tattoos, how would it be to provide templates for such works here. I think it would be interesting, just that I would need to document a bit about it. When I started to provide Christian web templates, I knew I am informed about this business since it is my main job. The same with Christian MySpace layouts, I knew about them quite a lot, but about religious tattoos, well, I don’t know that much.
So, in order to have the job done right, I would need to get informed. I don’t know if I will do it, but I surely consider it.
I think I will start discussing it with a few religious tattoo artists around, maybe they will want to start a collaboration of some sort, to upload such artworks on this site. In the end, what you need to have, I guess, are some pictures cleared of background, in a few colors that can be easily reproduced on skin.
I will think about it and if I will start to put here religious tattoos, you will be invited to contribute also!