Christian blog about church website design
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I was thinking these days if the financial crisis affected churches and their capabilities to invest in a website. I mean, building a site, even with cheaper solutions, needs money and in this crisis, money is not always something easy to find.
People look in every direction nowadays for some extra money, to save and not spend. I have seen people being so affected by this crisis that changed their lives forever.
So,considering this, I asked myself how churches look at this, how are churches affected by this crisis? Do they still find the money to buy a Christian template and build their website?
You know, I actually think that this may be a very good solution for them, because having a website may help their audience grow and more and more people will come to the church. The site will be a tool for promoting church activities and gathering more followers. I actually know this. You should speak to churches that recently built a web site, to see how this affected their overall audience. You should actually ask people that join your church, how did they find out about you, is the website responsible for this?
You will be surprised by how many people found out about you on the internet first!
Thoughts about Christian web design after holidays
After winter holidays passed, I can tell you a bit about how the internet activity has been and how it is this very day, in January. The fact is that some sales increased in December, it is actually normal, because most sales increase, so Christian web site templates also sell better. But in January, things are a bit slow in any business, so I expect that people wake up from this point of view a bit later, maybe now, after the first half of January.
The fact is that winter holidays are a very busy period for Christians and may be that web design and templates are not something very searched in that period, but now I expect people to start getting interested again about their church websites.
The fact is that in December, advertising was lower than usually since people were also willing to pay less for advertising, also possibly because of the general economic situation we are all in. I hope things will be better this year starting right now.
What are your feelings about it?
Build trust and the rest will follow
I have just posted an article on another site of mine about what is the most important feature of an ecommerce site and because it really connects to this field, Christian websites, I have decided to write about it here as well.
The fact is that it is not about ecommerce websites, it works great with Christian websites also, and with all types of websites out there. It works, because the most important feature of a site is not the look, not the most shiny template, not the most expensive engine, but the most important feature of a website is the level of trust you manage to transmit to your visitors. It works with ecommerce because you have there a measurable target, but it also works fine with all kinds of websites, because, even if you don’t realize, each site has a target. Like a Christian website, for example, the target could be to bring more people closer to God, to church, to faith. Isn’t this one of the greatest goals? Like another site I have, www.exersaucers.net that I am trying to build right now, exersaucer oriented, where I do my best to have an open relationship with my readers.
For this, people need to trust you and the site. People need to understand you are a real person behind the site, you need to understand that a site is a virtual world and the human touch sometimes is not there as it should be.
Maybe you are into blogging, well, in that case you should ask yourself why bloggers have so much success.It is because of the human touch most blogs transmit. A blog represents people, more than a regular, static website, so people will easily connect to a blog, because they understand the real people behind the site and will connect to them. It is all about trust, after all.
So, in order to have a successful site you need to build trust. That’s all it takes!
Internet activity for Christian websites increases at this time of the year
Now that the summer is gone, I see that people came back and traffic is increaqsing, it is that autumn increase that we all love! Especially myself and my websites! The fact is that it depends from topic to topic, but the same thing applies to almost all websites, no matter they are Christian websites or not.
Over summer time, the internet activity slowly decreases and internet businesses also decrease over summer time, but now everything is back to normal, people start working on their websites again, they start promoting, start looking for web templates to build their websites, everything is better.
That is why, to all of you coming back to the internet at this time of the year, I just want to say Welcome back! It would be interesting to ask yourself how is your topic of the website doing, how it fluctuates over the year. If you have never asked yourself that question, ask yourself now and you may understand why your traffic goes a bit down over the summer.
Using WordPress as a CMS
One of the most interesting things I have noticed lately is the fact that people consider WordPress a blogging platform only. Oh, what a great mistake! WordPress has an other hidden face, the face of a real CMS, able to power up static websites. I know because I build websites using WordPress as CMS.
It is not difficult at all, if you think about it! The only thing you should do is to create the pages you want and assign one as the index page, then edit a bit your WordPress theme and remove the area where categories or archive are displayed. It is that simple and it works fine.
WordPress is a powerful CMS and it can be customized to the point where you can not tell it is a WordPress engine behind it. Maybe only the fact that the URL have the WordPress format, without the file name and extension at the end of the URL, for the rest, you can not tell what is behind it.
This is a great feature, if you think about it, because it empowers you to develop websites fast and easy without spending time on developing the website engine and this is great when it comes to productivity, one of the things you should always consider when starting a business.
Think about it and next time when you want to start a website consider WordPress as a CMS and not as a blogging platform!
Again about religious tattoos
At one moment I have written here a post about religious tattoos. Now I come back on it again, because I found on the internet very interesting information. If you look on Google for religious tattoos you will see that there are plenty of sites providing art works and templates for them.
Seems that this market is quite good and there are enough people to make it work on the long run.
How about a list of websites providing religious tattoos?
Well, there are a lot of Christian websites oriented to this form of art. I would enumerate a few:
religioustattoos.net
I liked this site because it provides also good information about tattoos history, explain what tattoos mean in a religious meaning, etc. Overall, it is a site that offers a whole package, not only tattoos.
rankmytattoos.com
Even well ranked in G, it is not devoted to religious tattoos but more to the general market. It also provides a religious section, but nothing about history, biblical meaning, etc.
tattoojohnny.com
Exactly as the one above, even if it provides a good collection, it is not oriented to religion but to the general art.
I think that the first is the most important in my opinion because it offers you a reason for which you get a
tattoo and doesn’t let you with no clue about why you get inked. You need a strong motivation in order to have your skin inked and this site offers you enough motivation and information about religious tattoos.
Low budget website templates become a trend these days
Indeed, budget website templates (or low budget templates, that is) become a trend these days. With all that move towards open source, people are more and more interested in buying low budget templates, not spending big money for this.
It is somehow as in the car industry in some area, where people try to invest less and less in cars (I don’t peak about those people paying millions for a car) . So, it is the same with church website design here and with religious websites. People invest less and less in fancy look and feel and more in features and services. Low budget website templates became the choice of many Christian webmasters.
Of course, if you think, there is a cheaper alternative, free website templates, but there are not that many willing to share their work for free. At least they put some low budget templates instead of free ones, in order to sustain their business.
Watch around and you will see that budget website templates are more and more the choice of people around us.
Website template for a modern church
Well, this one is something! Website templates for modern church, yes we do feature such thing. The fact is that a modern church, by it’s definition also means following current trends and websites for sure are a sign of a modern church.
But indeed, there are some design trends also that the site of a modern church should follow. The website template of a modern church should be web 2.0 , should incorporate video sermons, streaming maybe or at least mp3 prayers and sermons ready for free download. That is how I see a modern church website and out templates allow easy integration of such services in order to fit the needs of any modern church.
Templates for custom church websites are more popular than Christian blog themes
Because of this Web 2.0 thing, I have always thought that blog themes are very searched for and very used. OK, they are, but you know something? Church blog themes are less searched and downloaded than regular designs for religious websites that are not blogs. I don’t know how to put it. Church designs that are not made for blogs but for custom religious websites are way more downloaded than religious blog design themes. That’s a fact!
What does this mean? Could that mean that people using religious websites are not that familiar with Web2.0? Or could this mean that religious blogs don’t serve well people’s interest, don’t work well for church websites? I think that this is not the case, maybe the first one, with church people being less interested in blogs. However, I must admit I was expecting more downloads for Christian blog themes.
I was thinking on adding Christian Mambo designs, or Joomla themes for religious sites, but I don’t know anymore. If blogs are not that popular, at least for me here, how would Joomla and Mambo work?
When working on the internet, you need an internet connection, doh!
These last weeks I was not able to work on my site too much. Actually, due tot he fact that I had no internet connection at home (I am moving into a new apartment) I could not access it at all. I feel really bad about this, I was used to work on this site each and every day, even if the volume of work was not large. A few words here, a few free Christian designs here and there, that was what it takes for it to work.
However, these last weeks I didn’t find the resource for it. During day time I don’t find the time and during evening, I can not. Not a nice situation.
I planned that custom church design thing, as I have posted a few days ago here, but this requires me to stay connected to the site, which I can not for the next 2 weeks. Man, I need my internet connection back to get back to work on my free religious designs. I need it like I need water. Am I addicted to internet or what?
The only thing that I can say about this is that any internet related “worker” needs an internet connection. How bad is that? No internet connection when I deliver free website templates. The only way for me to write posts for the blog is to write them offline and to paste them here in the morning, when I have a bit of time, cause the rest of the day is full and busy, no time for blogging. That is one big problem, I was usually doing this in the evening, having the time to read also reactions from fellow Christian designers, to see some other Christian blogs, etc.
I’ll see…