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.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!
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!
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.
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 use social media sites to promote Christian websites
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.
11 reasons you should avoid free hosting
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!
A church website needs work and involvment
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!
Christian sites need to be watched in order to grow!
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!