Christian blog about church website design

I haven’t had too much time to take care of MagicTemplate.com the way I would have liked to. I said, some time ago, that I would like to make this website work as a custom church web design interface for what we do, not only to give away free Christian web templates or sell premium Christian templates.

I know they both make a good topic for this site, but I think that we can offer more. Custom web design for churches may just be this thing. I think this will also help people a lot because by offering custom web design, people could come and tell us what they would like to get and we design it for them, so, beside downloading a free template, people could ask for some specific design work.

Church web design is a form of art and “custom” is the word for any form of art, that is why I think about this. It is not something that I have spent my time on planning, just a thought that is running through my head since a while.

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Yes, this is right, Christian web design is a business, you like it or not. When you run a Christian website building business, you need to pay people, you need to have a steady income, so you can not give everything for free. This is a business, you like it or not. I know that religion teach us to help people and we do it as much as we can. This is the reason for which we give away for free so many website templates that we have worked hard to design. But, again, when you run such a Christian website, you need to pay various services and for all these, you need money.

Running your Christian website as a business is the best thing you can do, because if it brings you money, you can pay for services needed in order for the site to work. Pay for designers, pay for hosting, pay for promotion, for whatever you need, so, my dear visitors, that is why I say that running you Christian web design site as a business, is a must.

I know most of us don’t feel comfortable asking for money and you rather help people by designing their website, but this is not something that you will be able to do on long term. On long term, you need to live and in order to live, you need to earn money. If you put work into your Christian website, you need to make some money out of it in order to make it work for a long time. It is that simple: Christian web design is a business, run it this way and you will have long term success!

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Some time ago I said I will not write again about Christian MySpace layouts, but lately more and more people entering my site look for them and I think about adding up a few of them. MySpace Christian layouts are really looked for and I am well ranked for them so I ask myself actually why not add a few?

That is because of the fact that the traffic is not high quality and they say it is better to have less traffic but high quality traffic than large but bad traffic and this is true. So far, the fact that I received quite a good number of visits from people looking for them, didn’t help me too much, after all. People come, people go, they don’t buy anything and they don’t download free religious templates either, they are kind of a “look around” visitors.

If you came to that site looking for Christian MySpace layouts and you feel you don’t recognize yourself and you think your visit here is useful, please accept my apologies, since I had no intention of making it sound bad, I just do a bit of analysis of my traffic. I receive here traffic that usually converts well either in purchasing premium Christian designs either downloading free church web design, which is the final target of this site, in terms of goals, but usually people looking for religious layouts don’t do either of those things. If you do, then you are welcome! Actually, if you are here for MySpace layouts and backgrounds, why don’t you look at our church web templates, maybe you will find a good use for some! Try them out, they are great, you know?

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I ask myself how many people realize the potential of a good layout when we speak about websites. Do you realize that the layout is the first thing a visitors sees when entering your website? When you have a Christian website, you should pick a good layout for it. And I am not speaking only about the colors and about how it looks from a color point of view, or how well it is designed. Not only!

When picking a good Christian website layout, you need to consider how information is structured, where to put the text, where to put the images, where to put the most important areas and informations. For example, if you have a news box that you want to stand out, where will you put it? You realize that the designer making the layout will put it where he will consider it looks better, but looking good is not the only condition, you should consider visibility, where user look first, etc. All these should be known by a good website designer that is also interested in ecommerce, and I will tell you why.

In ecommerce, all these things are studied and documented, because in ecommerce a good positioning means more money. The fact is that this can be applied to all the websites, including Christian websites, and this can be aplied when designing Christian layouts, believe me! Hot spots are there, no matter the domain of activity, just that in this case it is not about money but about users seeing your information and news. This is what I mean!

Study a bit ecommerce website templates and then come and apply what you have learned there, to designing Christian layouts, I think you would be happy with the results!

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I have started this website with the desire to provide religion oriented themes for sites and blogs, but soon I have observed the need of expanding this to other similar domains. So, I have soon started to provide family website templates and charity templates.

Family website templates are a great way to build a site for your family. I have seen lately more and more people that are interested in having a family web site, just that they don’t have web knowledge to start it from scratch so they rather pick a family web template and dress up a blog or something, in order to act as a virtual home for them. It is an initiative that I totally salute and support. This way, interaction between people will be better and people will speak on the internet too. Knowing you have shared your family pictures so your loved ones can see them it is a fun way of getting people together interested in internet. I love that, really!

Family website templates are good for getting people together, I can tell you that! Have a site for your family and give each member a subdomain and an email address, you will see how well things will work. Like in john.yourfamilydomain.com and john@yourfamilydomain.co. It is very fun and you can all communicate together using these addresses. Or mom@yourfamilydomain.com .

Wouldn’t that be fun?

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It is very interesting to see how people that are not necessarily looking for religious web templates run away when visiting this site.  Of course, this site ranks well in some cases for searches such as free ecommerce website templates, other similar keywords and people entering this site, see that it is all for Christian communities, templates for Christian websites, and run away. Really!

I don’t want to discuss here the religious reason, because some run because of the religious profile of this website, but other I guess run because they suppose they won’t find anything they are looking for, unless they are looking for church website design.

I just want to tell them that our free website templates, even if they are religioun oriented and seem out of their regular niche, can be adapted to whatever they want. Can you imagine taking a Christian website theme and adapt it to something else? Like for ex an ecommerce animal template! Really, even if it seems so far aways, well, it is not. You can adapt it and still build your site using one of our designs.

There is no need to run away, folks! We won’t bite! Really! Look at how our themes are built. They usually contain some religious oriented images, that give he specific of the site and that particular image can be changed to whatever you like, it is like with the premium church templates that you see on our website.

Think smart! Have a free church website theme and use it for whatever you need. It is not expensive you know because…it is free!

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How much are you actually willing to pay for a free website template for your religious website? I mean, not money, because it is free, so there is no money involved in this, just that there are other small contribution you should respect. For example, in some cases, people ask for a small contribution if you like to help the site grow.

In other cases, like with our site here, we ask you to keep that link back to our website as requested in our terms of use. It is the least you can do and it doesn’t cost you anything while for us it means the recognition of our work. Because we work for our religion based templates, you know…

Keeping the link back to us, in the bottom of your site, saying something like Christian templates, or free religious web templates or church web design, etc, will help us grow a bit, because there will be people following the link to our website and day by day, more and more people will know about us. It is that simple.

Removing the link in the bottom of the screen will actually break the contract you and I had when you downloaded the template. The link back is the only thing we asked you to do, for the rest there is no money involved, no other recognition. Just a link back to our website. It is that easy!

Next time when you download one of our free religion templates and you want to remove the link, think about the people who worked on that template, who designed the template and spent hours to make it work so you use it free of any charge on your site and please, let the link there. It will be your proof of respect for our work.

Thank you!

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I consider myself lucky because I have started this web site. I can tell you that the evolution of this site has been good and I love every day spent here. It is a good situation, people are interested in religion templates, religious design is more and more searched for, in my opinion it shows a better world, and I think you can understand why. A better interest for religion can only be good and this is something I am happy for.

A lot of people ask me one thing or another about design and layouts for churches and I don’t always manage to answer right. This is partly because I don’t always have time. In other cases is because I don’t always have the best answer. In this case I try to point them to the best person who can answer them. For example, I have been often asked about permission to remove the bottom link. I can tell you this: the bottom link may be removed, on particular cases, when the design is mine. This is something that I discuss from person to person with the user. When the design is not mine and is based on a templates started by somebody else, I can not say remove the link, since it is not my right. In this cases, I ask the user to speak directly to the original template designer. Usually, links are removed after paying a small fee for the original designer, case when everybody is happy. Religious designers must also live, you know…

Also I have been asked if I design custom church templates. Yes, I design custom church templates, so if you want a custom church design, ask an estimate using the contact form. I will do my best to match your needs and budget.

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I was thinking some time ago about starting to design on demand, custom church templates. Custom church design may be a good thing if you think about it. People needs such service, don’t you think? In my opinion, custom Christian website designers are hard to get and each time I think about it I am more and more convinced that this is the way to go.

I see a lot of churches downloading my religion templates and implementing them on their websites but I see at the same time that not many of them have proper web design understanding so when implementing a free layout on their religion website, they don’t always manage to do it properly.

That is why I think more and more about offering a service of custom church design, so people don’t even think about customizing a template, but about designing what’s best for them. And I am thinking of offering this service at a fixed price, not calculating it each time. If I offer fixed prices, I think people will find it easier to access it and order such a custom design.

I think that at first I could go with designing custom Christian templates, on demand, not a full website. Let’s say that you want a template but don’t want to buy a predefined one, so you ask us to design it for you. If you want to implement it yourself, it will cost that much to get the design ready. If you want us to implement it, it will cost you that much. This is what I am thinking about and I really consider implementing this on long term. How about it? Would you be a client to my custom church web design service?

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There are more and more Christian websites around and this can only make me happy. As long as the interest for religious sites, church websites, private ministry sites exists, this is a good sign and gives me a good feeling about how we are.

Christian websites form a specific market, because the people searching for them and visiting them know exactly what they are looking for and what to expect there. It is not as with other sites where the market is not that targeted. In such environments, people tend to have a large quantity of reliability and trust. E-commerce on church websites is better because the possibility to be cheated is small, Christians have a rate of trust that is very high.

Also, because of this, they form a quite compact circle and built their own Christian websites where you can find whatever one needs. Starting with church websites hosting to custom religious site design, to online ministries, you can find on the internet whatever you dream of regarding this particular but very trusty niche. Christian sites are here and will be for a long, long time!

Stick with us and visit us as often as possible to see what we can bring new to you!

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