Christian blog about church website design

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.

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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!

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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?

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Did you ever ask yourself if social media will work for church websites? Religion is not necessarily a subject to create a buzz, unless something happens. But the question is can a Christian website be sustained and grown from social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc?

There are many sites promoted by social media sites, some work better, some don’t work so well, but everybody tries his luck with this new buzz.

The fact is that in most of the cases, users of these social media sites are not very religious, they are more tech savvy and in many cases won’t promote and vote religious sites. I asked to promote this site using Digg and SU and the fact is that when I posted a particular website template, it was OK, but not regular articles. Those didn’t work…

Use social media sites oriented on your particular niche. They work better.

There are such social sites based on religious niche and they only promote religious websites. This kind of niche sites work better, it is common knowledge and they should be used to promote religious websites, One of these sites is blogs4god.com. The only (big) disadvantage of this site is the fact that it doesn’t have too much of a traffic so it won’t send too much traffic to your site and this is the exact reason for which you would use social media sites.

Find religious categories on general purpose social media sites

An other trick would be to go to regular visited sites and look for religious categories, if they have it. In such case, even if you won’t receive a huge traffic overnight, you may still get a decent spike.

Promote your products from an other angle

This is kind of a trick, if you want. Instead of promoting your products on the regular religious way, find an other approach. Let’s say you design Christian MySpace layouts. Instead of promoting your MySpace layouts and backgrounds as being religious, you may submit them to design categories, for ex. Promote them as free MySapce layouts, without making them Christian, just regular, all purpose. This way you can send them to more general categories like design, images, graphic, etc.

These are only a few ideas that you may find useful. I am sure you can enhance this list and come up with new ideas on how to use social media sites to promote your Christian websites.

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I have seen people asking around what exactly do they need when it comes to picking the right hosting package for their Christian website. I don’t speak here about picking one hosting provider or an other (even if personally I use IXWebHosting (click to see for yourself) for a lot of my projects), but about why you should avoid hosting your site “for free”, or what is “the price of a free hosting”.

While there are a lot of hosting providers that will give you free hosting for your site, you should avoid hosting your website on such servers, for a multitude of reasons.

First of all, ask yourself why they would offer you for free something they make money from. The reason would be publicity. Free stuff means traffic, means people finding out about yourself and about your service. This would be good for business on the long run.

1) A “free” hosting package usually has annoying ads

That is true and you admit it yourself, isn’t it? In most of the cases, free hosting means you will get advertising on your account, advertising that will pay your hosting provider money. You will probably have pop-ups, pop-unders, floating ads, etc. This way you build traffic and your hosting provider gets advertising, so probably after a short while the hosting service will get from the advertising displayed on your site more than you would normally pay for monthly hosting.

2) Bad service

Even if they seek publicity, exposure and “the buzz”, nobody will assign the best server for free hosting, let’s face it! The best servers cost money and they need to bring money in, so they will host payed hosting, sites hosted for free being assigned to some slow servers, with less resources, that will make your site to load slowly, driving your visitors away. Also, this is due to the fact that they will host so many websites on that free server that the resources will be exhausted even faster. More websites on one server means less available space, less available bandwidth, less available speed. You don’t need this, I tell you!

3) Not enough scripting and database support

This is in case you get any. Period. Usually free hosting package means HTML only, no PHP or ASP support and about databases such as MySQL, we should not speak about from the start because you won’t get any! Maybe it does not mean much to you, if you are not familiar with website technology, but scripting support enables you to have some interesting and useful scripts integrated on your site from third party providers. Database support means shopping carts, statistics, users, etc. Wouldn’t you like to have a blog on your site? Well, if you use a free hosting, then you probably won’t get this.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t speak about dedicated blogging platforms such as Blogspot.com or Wordpress.org. No, I speak about regular free website hosting that is not dedicated to hosting free blogs.

4) Customer support? What is that?

Another feature you will probably need is customer support. When you pay for something, you require support from people providing that service, but when you get it for free with a license of type “as is” you won’t be able to ask for much isn’t it? I won’t say more, you get my point.

5) Lack of reliability

This is something that you will get a lot. You try to visit your site and you will not find it, because the server will be down. Your friends will call you asking you what happened to your site, did you stop it? Because they can not find it. You didn’t stop it but you can not find it either…

This is caused by the fact that on free hosting there are a lot of people hosting untrusted sites that will probably crash at some point. The probability is high since they are so many. When the server stops, it stops for all the sites hosted there, not just for the one that caused the crush. And this means the server will stop for you too…

6) You won’t get too many tools to help you in maintaining your site

Payed hosting usually provides a lot of useful tools like statistics, file managers, ftp managers, backups, etc. All these will not be available in most of the cases. They help. Actually the reason for which they don’t provide such services is the fact that the premium packages they offer probably offers such tools so you will get one more reason to get annoyed and upgrade to a payed hosting account. Don’t you think I am right?

7) Backups.Oh, yes!

You need backups! I know I need them quite often. Everytime I make a mistake I am able to go back to yesterday’s version of the site and find what I need. This way I never lose anything. Free hosting doesn’t provide such services in most of the cases.

Third party gadgets and services

One of my friends complained to me about not being able to install Adsense on his free website because the service provider does not allow him to do this. Of course! I advised him to upgrade and get a payed but cheap hosting package to solve this problem since advertising will probably bring him enough money to pay for the hosting.

9) Watch out! Free services can stop anytime!!

That’s the worse reason out of all of them! You work so much for your website so you probably won’t be too happy to find out that due to whatever reasons your site has been deleted without further notice. I know it happened to me once and the site was perfectly fine, just that the terms of service required me to log in every 3 months. Well, I didn’t know that and when I knew it was too late for my site.

10) No domain redirection

Usually, free hosting providers don’t allow you to redirect your domain there. So, instead of having the address YourSiteName.com you will be stuck with YourSiteName.YourFreeServerName.com for life, because this serves their goal: advertising, exposure, brand building. While with your own domain your visitors won’t know where you have your site hosted, while if you also maintain their domain in your address, everybody will know. It’s again, free publicity for them!

11) Emails under your own domain name

If you have your domain name, you can create emails under that domain name, if you can not park your domain there, you can not have emails under your domain name, it is that simple, see reason 10. For example if you have the address YourSiteName.com you can have the email YourName@YourSiteName.com. Isn’t that great? Well, not with free hosting. Considering point 10, this is usually not possible with free hosting…

While these reasons are true for most of the free hosting providers, they are not true for all of them, or at least not all the reasons at the same time for all the service providers. For example, you may find free hosting without advertising or with PHP support, or with domain parking, but they will never ever offer you the same services as with payed hosting because they have no reason to do so. Payed hosting brings money. Free hosting brings less money than the first category, it is that simple.

These are only 11 reasons for which you should avoid free website hosting and go for payed one. You can find cheap hosting without any problem so, in God’s name, please avoid free hosting. It doesn’t pay on long term!

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I was thinking these last few days about what makes a good church website. Is it the design? A good church website design makes a good site? Is it the information? Well, I think that the answer is participation. Implication, being involved makes a good website. A website template is not good if left alone. A good website is good when is continuously improved, when it is continuously updated and when the information is continuously changed so people feel it grows.

It is very interesting, in my experience as a website designer I have found myself in a situation where I didn’t know what to put in the index page of a website, because the site owners didn’t give me too much information. But, after a while, when there was a constant communication and interest to make the site grow, I had not enough space in the index page for all the information that I had because the site grew in time and the owners sent me more than enough information to put on the site. I love these sites that perform this way. They also perform better in terms of traffic, users, ROI and customer loyalty, because people understand that behind the site there is somebody caring and willing to invest work in it. This is the way every site should be, this is they way YOUR website should work. So, as a short question, do you invest time and work in your church website or you just let it stay there because your work was done and the site is online? Think about it!

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I have read somewhere that every thing that is watched, grows. I watch this website since day one and it continues to grow, with small traffic variations based on the moment of the year we are on. Some periods are better than others, it is that simple. In some moments, internet in general and Christian web templates are not the hottest thing of the moment, and this is inverse proportional with the temperature of the season. Right: summer time is bad for internet, usually people is outside, on the sun, at the seaside, taking a sunbath and caring less about internet or about Christian web design and unfortunately, sometimes, caring less about the church, which is never a good thing to do.

But after a period of time, the traffic comes back and people start again be interested in how to build a church site, because they return to the Holy Spirit and they become more and more interested in Christian related resources.

I keep on offering these free website templates on my website, people will know about the fact that they are here and they will come to download them anytime they like, they will find free church templates here at any hour.

I also hope to make it grow as a community, the very essence of the internet today, so the traffic grow even bigger. And you know what? I count on you to help me do this!

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Some time ago we decided to add a section to this website so we allow our users to upload their own Christian templates on our site so our users can download them for free. I can tell you we worked a bit to develop this section and we were proud to add this feature to our site. However, I can tell you that there was not a very successful thing to do and I don’t know why is that.

The initial intention was to allow people to add their own free website templates so we expand our collection fast, cause there is not that easy to maintain such a website on a small team.

The fact is that there are enough people registered on our site, as designers that showed their intention to participate, since they created an account, just that they don’t upload templates. The process is very simple, so I can not tell for the moment why this is happening, but I promise to find out and do in such a way that the collection expand.

I would love that this site expand and grow from a small team (2 people) operating it to a community based site where people contribute. I have at this moment a very interesting base of visitors and email subscribers so I ask myself how could I grow this site into a community?

Any ideas?

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I know I said it a couple of days ago, but indeed, I think during summer period, Christian web templates are not a very hot subject people search for. I know that probably people think more and more about summer, holidays, beach, etc, and less about religion, spirituality and web templates with Jesus images. I know that there are periods for everything and periods where certain things don’t go well, and I think that the summer time is one of those periods when Christian web design is not the hot subject around.

However, I consider that even in such cases, people need to focus and think a bit forward. When religion and spirituality will become again the subject to think about for most people, try to be prepared. There is a saying with the smart man who builds a sleigh during summer, I think it has a point. Build your religious web site now in order to have the time to promote it and rank it well in Google for the period when the subject will be hot again, meaning a couple of months from now.

You know that there are some cycles when certain topics work well and certain topics don’t go that well. Religion does not go so well from the point of view of people interest, over the summer. I guess it is not only something specific to websites but also to churches, probably church members go to the church less during summer than during autumn and winter, for ex. It would be interesting to know. However, in just a couple of months we will be back on top!

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People asked me if they should have an email list on their church website. I say yes, yes, yes! People should have such email lists everywhere, church websites don’t make any difference form regular sites.

Start your email list on your church website and maintain a close relationship to people coming to your church. Let your church site become your virtual host, your virtual church, don’t just treat it as a magazine, treat your church website as a living entity, where people come and read information.

No matter what site you have, Christian website or not, you should maintain a mailing list for a close contact to your people, it always help. Think about this and start sending email to people with the most important information. Never send unsolicited emails, always assure that you only send emails to those people that subscribe to such a service, because otherwise you will find yourself in a situation where your email will do more harm than good, people will look at it as being malicious and this is the last thing you would like, right?

But the power of email marketing is huge, you can always tell your subscribers when there will be your next church meeting, what to expect, the program, something you think they would be interested in, this kind of stuff. And also remember to monitor how people received the email. Did they open it? Did they read it? Did they just delete it? Is the email good or is a broken email that nobody reads?

All these things should be considered when handling your email marketing list for your church website. I will tell you more about it in a next article so stay close!

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