Christian blog about church website design

The most difficult task for a Christian webmaster is to promote his religious websites because this is a never-ending story. You can never say ok, I have promoted my site enough so I should stop it now and do something else. No, there is no such thing as this. If you have more religious websites to take care of, then the task is more difficult since each of them requires time and work, which you usually don’t have.

One of the best strategies in this case is to make a team of people and ask them to help you promoting your  Christian websites. The more people you can get, the better. Just that you need to pay attention to the way they promote your site cause a mistake may harm your reputation. Always pay attention to how they represent your website, to what they write and to what they say in relation to your website.

Being the fact that religious websites holds a bigger responsibility, you should do this as often as possible. But the happy part in all this is the fact that religious websites are built around communities and  the site represent the community itself. If this is the case, then you should consider yourself lucky since a community represent a linked group of people with the same interests s, remember, the more, the better! So, you have your help now!

Anyway, you should always prepare a plan for promoting your business in a community. If you want to give a specific  flavor to your religious website, maybe you intend to build a brand,or something similar. In this case you need to inform everybody that is implied in directly promoting your site about how you want your website to be seen outside and how they should act related to this.

In one word, you should always pay attention to how your website is promoted, by you or by your community members since a good reputation builds communities and your community needs to grow!

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Each website is unique. I know you have probably heard this before, but I can only repeat it so you get the point. Each website is unique. What works for one site, may not work for an other one and this is a fact. I own more websites, MagicTemplate.com being one of them, but what works for MagicTemplate.com donesn’t work for other websites the same way the reverse is true.

It is an interesting fact that leads to thinking a particular solution for each site. You should try with each site you develop all the strategies you can think of in order to see what works and what doesn’t work. For example, there are some websites that work better as socially promoted sources, submitted to social networks go as high as possible, while others won’t work with social networks but work with search engines.

You should try everything that comes to your mind just to start the engine. Also you should try as much as possible to see what turns people on from the point of view of your site’s topic and work more in that direction.

How about monetizing your site?

Also, you should think that if you monetize your site one way or an other, depending on your site type, some monetization channels work better than others while for the other type of sites is the other way around.

Maybe you think that this has not anything to do with Christian related websites, well, I think it has since also Christian websites need to be promoted and due to the particular religious topic, Christian websites may need particular promotion channels.

What do you think?

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Building web sites in not an easy task. What most of the people visiting a website does not know is how much it takes to build the traffic for that particular site he is visiting. Well, some of us know it takes a long, long time to build the traffic. it requires long hours marketing it, building links, making people see you and most of all, remember you. What is a website without people recognition? it is close to nothing, I would say. In order to become famous, a website needs to be recognized by people.

You have a Christian website, but if people will forget you the second they left the site, it is not a good thing, believe me. You need to make people come back again and again and again on your site. Give them interesting  information, give them facts, news, Christian resources, prayers, Christian songs, forums, whatever keeps them interested and motivated. Make them tick! That is what you need.

By the way, one of the things I do to make them remember the name MagicTemplate.com is to put the name in bold red in the bottom of the screen with that imperative “Remember the name” thing. I think it works, in my opinion.

Do the same for yourself and see if you experience returning visitors number growth or not. it won’t hurt, believe me!

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I was thinking the other day about using Christian Flash templates for building websites of your church. Is it good or not? If you think about the fact that the majority of your church site visitors are looking for information more than layout, maybe you should consider using plain church css templates. Church css templates are easier to use on your site, they have the advantage of loading fast on your site and being easy to customize. Church Flash templates look great on your site, they give you that lovely animation that you have seen on that site you loved. But how fast is it loading? Is it going to take a lot pf bandwidth? Are your visitors ready to wait a bit before seeing the content? With church css templates they won’t be needing any time before seeing the actual content. Church css templates or Christian HTML content, does not matter, they load fast. But if you want your church website to have a glamorous look, a “new media” look then go for it, use a Christian Flash template, they will do the job perfectly.

I usually base my work around search engines, I want my site to be indexed well and I work for this thus I usually use css templates in order to do the job. But I also use Flash templates when the client requires it since there are people looking for that special site they have seen once somewhere, that special site that does some kind of a nasty trick and has sound and he wants it too. Most of the time I explain what are the advantages of using Flash templates or css templates for a site and based on these advantages or disadvantages, people chose one way or the other.

All you need to do is to balance the needs vs desire, to ask yourself what your church website is for? Do you intend to build and informative website around your community needs or build a site that have a strong visual  impact on your visitors? Of course you can have both at the same time but it requires a great deal of skills and work.

How about it?

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You know, I imagine a website as being one big factory of some sort. Imagine this starting from the results it delivers. Think about serving 50 000 people per month, selling things to them, providing free website templates, etc. How many people would you need when running such a business? For 50 000 people or more you need a lot of workers serving your business in order to make it work. You would need people to arrange the merchandise, to show it to customers, to entertain and to explain what is needed, etc

Think now about a website. If you build it right, it works like an automated factory, company, showroom , sales force, etc. Just build your site the way you should and the site will run by itself. I think like this because I know this site and the way it behaves. It works great with so little effort.

All you need is to build it right from the start. This should be a new post, actually, how to build a site right from the start. A website should automate sales, should automate the presentation of your business, actually a site is a virtual robot working for yourself. If you want, a website is a personal factory. You won’t need tones of people to sell website templates, for ex, or to give them for free, all you need to do is to have a well planned mechanism that allow the user to get what he needs. This is my personal opinion on websites, it is an opinion developed in time from experience.

What do you think,am I  right?

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One of the most interesting facts to watch is the variation of visits from some particular keywords. Let’s take for example “church website templates”. For this criteria, among a lot other criteria, I am on the first position in Google. Now the funny part comes: there are days when I see no visit by this keyword. How can this be possible? Well, apparently there are days when some keywords are not searched and that is that. There is not a continuous search for some criteria I am using.  That is because my visitors come from a lot of long tail searches, all of them in this religious niche of church website design and I don’t have a high search volume on one particular keyword that bring me a high part of my traffic. Instead I have traffic from a lot of low search volume keywords. That is good since there is no danger of losing traffic cause I would lose ranking for a particular keyword. That is good.

Just that is funny to watch how a particular keyword in some days is searched and in others is not searched at all. This is actually the same with every long tail targeting, no matter the niche, religious or not. If you have a long tail targeted website then you know what I mean.

However, in this case the answer is to build as many religious long tail keywords that bring you small traffic from a lot of sources. This is actually a stronger website, if you want to visually figure your website then think about a pyramid with a large base. That’s my website. The base being large then it is very stable and there is no need to worry about being hurt by search engine variations, in this case.

On the other hand, if you have a site that has all the traffic coming from 2-3 highly searched keywords, one slight variation of the search volume may throw your traffic on the ground. Such a website could be compared to a very high tower, high but with a small base of 2-3 keywords. Just imagine how a blow of search engine wind would hurt it.

That’s why I am happy with how my website is going on long term. Because  it is a long tail targeted site and this will be way harder to hit so will have a steady and long term traffic.

Am I right or what?

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One of the most important activity of a webmaster is getting links. A Christian webmaster is no different, he needs to get links, as many links as possible to his website. I was reading today a post about how to get links. Some of them are not quite “white hat” but they work. And some of them are just funny.

But beyond these  the task still remains: you need to build links. If you build a quality Christian website, other Christian websites will happily link to you, in a natural “link love” process. Just provide a clean and valuable website. Of course, you need to get links, all the time, this is you day to day job, to get links. In a situation where you give some free design like I do here, your task is easier since people using your templates will link you for providing them free website templates. This has nothing to do with Christian templates, you could provide whatever design you want. Just keep the link!

Also remember to ask webmasters for links back to you. This will be easier when your PR will grow a bit. If you have a PR of 4 it will be easier to ask for a quality link than if you have no PR, then nobody will be happy to link to you just because you asked nicely.

It is a strange situation since in order to get a higher PR you need links and of course, it will be easier to get links when you offer a link back from your higher PR website!

Am I right or what?

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I was reading a few days ago about forums not being too “Web 2.0″, not being in “trend”. Well, is it? Or to discuss it focused on our niche: are Christian forums still a real presence in this continuously evolving internet environment?

In my opinion, nothing will change this. Christian forums and any forum, after all, put people with common interests together. I think that no matter how many social networks or blogs you have, a forum will still be preferred for some actions such as a quick reading a thread to get informed on a topic, to ask some targeted audience a question that interests you, to answer such a question, etc. Are blogs 2.0? Well, I think that they and social networks constitute the very heart of Web 2.0 environment. How about forums? I think that even if they are not the leading stars of the general movement, forums are still there, useful and present.

I think that there are some forum webmasters that would scream out loud when hearing that forums are considered not too active and popular nowadays. I think they know better, actually if you look at a forum with 15000 users or 30000 users or so, how could you possible say that it is not popular?

I would say that under any circumstances we can not say that forums are not popular nowadays. And maybe Web 2.0 also. How about it?

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What I like about websites is the fact that they are self-standing businesses. Yes, and that is one of the most important aspects of the internet environment. Did you see people on TV presented as the manager and founder of somewebsite.com? They are not presented as being the CEO of the company behind, but as the manager of a website. That means that the website is a business by itself. And that allows it to grow and develop.

I also know and I have previously spoken about this here, that they say that a businessman in order to succeed in a business usually starts a lot. Well, with websites sometimes is easier to do it than in an offline environment and sometimes it allows you to test it better. The fact that you have access to a number of marketing tools is an other great thing because you can predict the way your business may grow.

How about a Christian business?

Also with Christian websites is the same. You should not limit yourself to build a website for your church and stop there. Just think about the opportunities of a Christian business. There are many possibilities to start a Christian oriented business, such as a website for Christian communities, you could start a web design business oriented to Christian market, you could start a website for Christian singles, you could start a website for counseling Christians in need, etc. OK, maybe the last one may not be such a great business, since the idea is to help people in need not to ask money from them when in need, that should be the spirit. But think about it and come with ideas, you could do so  much with a Christian website. You could start a book store and sell religious books or how about a religious antique store? Just think about it!

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These last few days I have started considering again adding the area of Christian MySpace layouts back to this site. You know why? Believe me or not, because I was not able to find that particular site where you get decent Christian MySpace layouts. Really. All MySpace layouts for Christian profiles are looking crowded, ugly, not the way I like, anyway.

That is why I am thinking to provide such Christian MySpace layouts. Not many, not thousands but a few good ones. A few that give you the possibility to have a Christian profile that be proud of.

I have found a few nice ones on the internet, but I am not speaking about collections or websites but about particular layouts, which made it difficult to find, since they are hidden among ugly designs. And you know why? Because they are generated by a Christian MySpace layouts generator that build them one by one from some scrap data.

How could you build hundreds of Christian MySpace layouts in minutes?

Well, believe me or not, there are people that do it. Have a generator like the one I just told you about, feed it with a folder full of Christian MySpace graphics, Christian glitter images and text, let it chose a few colors randomly and push the button. Of course this would not be the way a decent designer would do. A designer would chose the colors, would think about what to add there and how to design the profile. Just that…it takes time and a normal designer would not have the time to build hundreds and thousands of Christian MySpace layouts and backgrounds one by one. It would be too much. That is why you can not find decent layouts or backgrounds out there. Because they are robot processed. And picture this:  a “robot” processed layout for a social network that put people together.

Again, the best way and the only one I would recommend for good experience is  a good designer and a bit of common sense. Not a robot. This is why I am thinking to provide a few good Christian MySpace backgrounds and layouts here on my site. What do you think?

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