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 about a Christian community site?
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?
Religion and spirituality, not very hot during summer, am I right?
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!
Should a Christian website have email lists?
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!
Is there such service as free Christian images?
I was thinking about a service that I would have liked to have: Christian images only. Think about it: a public image database providing only Christian pictures, Christian graphics. If this service would also be for free, then it would be just perfect: free Christian images. How does it sound to you?
I know that there are collection of photographies on the internet providing free images, and among them you can find religious oriented ones, but a site providing only Christian images I think it would make a great niche!
Is there such a service? If so, I would love to see it, I think we could all benefit from it! When you design website templates for free, you need also additional services like free religious images. Such service would come very handy, in my opinion.
If you know such a service, share it with us here and we would be happy to promote it here!
Christian templates became a crowded niche
To my surprise, I have observed that Christian templates became a busy niche! Church website templates, Christian websites, in general, became more than a market where there were not many people involved. Today, there are more sites providing Christian related templates, because people are more and more turned to religion and spirituality and people are asking for such Christian websites.
However, if you think about it, I am not afraid at all. First because we should not make a big thing out of it. Competition is good, right? Competition among sites offering Christian templates should not even be a big thing, we should all be partners and friends, right?
This is how I see it, after all. I know that we could also consider our websites as small businesses that compete against each other but I rather not look at it from this point of view. I just like to consider our sites aspart of a big friendly community of Christian sites.
Christian website or not, don’t spread yourself too thin!
I have decided to share a small tip about site growing. This is because we are in this environment of websites and stuff. I know this is not necessarily related to religious sites or religion or spirituality or whatever you want. It is related to websites and, no matter you are here for a religion based design, a family website template or a charity website template, you want to build a site. Right? I thought so…
I know this tip because I do this mistake all the time: my advice to you is to always focus on one, maximum 2 websites and grow those sites. If you grow more websites at a time, you won’t be able to maintain them and that is a mistake. A website needs to grow and bring visitors, a website needs to be visited everyday by a lot of people. If you spend your time on 5-6 websites that you try to grow, you won’t make any of them big. I know because this is what I am fighting against! I have more websites, this Christian website is just one of them and the time spent to maintain them is large and I never have enough time to grow them correctly.
So, instead of growing 5-6 sites at a time, focus on one maximum 2 sites and bring them to whatever traffic you consider to be appropriate, and then move on to the next one! Never spread yourself thin! No matter if you are running a religion website or a soccer one!
Setting your goal:first page in Google
When you start a website, one of your main concern should be to rank well, on the first page of Google for your keywords. This was my concern when I started this website, I wanted to rank well for Christian website templates, church templates, and all the related keywords. And so I did, you can check it for yourself if you like.
You should try to do the same and rank well with your website because this is the single most efficient and at the same time cheap traffic you can get. There is no traffic more efficient than the traffic from Google. at least for me and for my religion website templates. This is absolutely great for me and I can bet it would be the same for you, just that you need to work a bit to get that.
Getting on Google is not an easy task to do, it is a bit tricky and you need to know what you are doing, but with a bit of work and proper research you can achieve this. All you need to do is to propose to achieve it, because we know that the best way to do something is to set goals. Set your goal so you can reach the first page on Google for the proposed keywords and you are on your way there. For me, Christian design, church website designed, worked. For you, I don’t know, you need to figure it out for yourself!
Just start reading about it and study! In time you will learn!
Family website templates
We have received lately questions about our family website templates collection. It is very interesting that people looking for religion templates look also for related domains such as charity templates, wedding templates and family website templates. I guess it is all about the values, which are the same. That is why I want to point you to our page about family website templates and tell you that every design there meets the same values as our Christian templates.
Family is one of the highest values of our society and we wanted to make our templates to show this at a first glance. You will see happiness, joy, children and parents, all these on warm colors in order to give your site a beautiful look and feel.
All our family templates can be considered Christian due to these values that we respect and promote. Think about our family websites as being an extension to our religion based design, not a separate area of our site. This is the way we see it and this is the way we invite you to consider it!
A few thoughts about running a Christian website
There are many niches out there. Each of these niches makes a good market for a website. However, I must say I am very happy with how Christian websites work as a niche. Really. I have always desired a market where people are kind, willing, honest and religious market is what defines the best these concepts.
If you start a Christian website you should know that people are this way. Well, I guess that if you are into religion, you probably already know that because you see this around you every day. People are kind and willing to help. That’s why is always good to give something back to the community, this is why I like giving free templates to religious community, because you have real people to give them to.
I was asked a few days ago if I run this website for profit or for non-profit. Well, this is an online store if you think about it, I sell religion templates, so you could say it runs for profit. Just that don’t think about it as a very large profit, but this site’s got to live. Visitors means bandwidth, visitors means templates stored on our server and all these mean storage space and again, all these mean money payed to the hosting company.Also a lot of work to maintain this website up and running. So running this website for non-profit would be only for a short time, then we would need to shut down.
But I do enjoy very much this religious website, it brings me much joy and accomplishment and I think that this is what it really matters on long term.
Wedding website templates, a beautiful collection
One of the things I have not spoken much lately is the fact that on this site we also provide wedding website templates. Really, I don’t know why I didn’t promote it the way I should have done it since we feature a beautiful collection of wedding website templates here on our website.
We also promoted this part of our site as “marriage templates”, “marriage website templates”, etc but I think that we didn’t take the best approach to it.
But are wedding web templates appropriate for a site oriented mostly to religious websites?
Well, I think that yes, because wedding has a very important religious component and while some believe that it is enough to marry by civil laws only, we strongly believe that weddings need God’s blessing. That’s why I believe that wedding website templates have their place here on MT. Christian wedding website templates or not,we offer you whatever you need to put up a site in minutes.
Who is the target for wedding templates?
Wedding website templates are oriented to people wanting to show their friends a beautiful album of their marriage day, day that they have been part of. Most beautiful photos can be made public on such an online album.
The second category of people that are in our target is made of wedding organizers, companies that put up the ceremony from 0. These companies need a professional website for their activities and that is why we provide such wedding templates to build easier the website they need.