Building a Church Website
by Chris Ryerson
Have you been asked to build a website for your church? There are thousands of
people building websites everyday. It is becoming increasingly important for many small
organizations and groups to build their online presence. This helps in getting their
ideals, goals, and mission out to the general public. Therefore at an increasing rate
many of us with computer skills are asked by organizations to put together a website.
This happened to me about two years ago when the school I worked at asked me to build
a website for them to help advertise their special arts programs.
The only problem with this is many of us do not have the skills nor the time to build
and keep up a whole site. It takes a lot to be the webmaster of a website and it is no
simple task. However often it is too expensive to pay a web designer to build a custom
site for an organization and so the task often falls to an amature or even some one
with no experience.
This is what happened to me with the website that I build for my school. I didn't have
the first clue about website design or html. So that forced me to learn the basics and
use what tutorials and templates that I could find online. I made it through the
experience and like many others found that it was a lot of fun. Therefore I started
building a bunch of other sites. I would bet that this happens to many.
This article will help the beginning web designer or even volunteer set up a basic Church
website. However since there is not a lot of money to spend on the project and often
people have really unrealistic ideas about what a website can do we will give you
some good guidelines and tips to get started.
The first thing that you need to have a real good idea about is your level of experience
with building websites. It is really important to be honest with yourself and the
church that you belong to in order to create a realistic expectation. If you are a
beginner then it is fine to admit that, we all have to start somewhere. However, if
you are a beginner don't plan on building an elaborate SQL php backend that can be
dynamically updated or anything like that.
Below I have provided some basic definitions of skill level that might help you assess
where you are at.
Beginner - You are this level fall anywhere in between never setting up a site to
having built a site or two with an online website builder or a pre made website like
those provided on Yahoo, or AngelFire.
Intermediate - If you have either set up a website with an online builder and
customized the site some or built a website using a template then you fall into the
intermediate category.
Advanced - You have set up many sites before and often use templates for ideas but
tweak them so much they hardly resemble the template when you are finished.
How you choose to build your website depends largely on two factors, your time
commitment to the project and your skill level. These two factors have a strong
correlation between them. Meaning if you have lots of time and are a beginer you
will be able to build more advanced websites. However if you are an advanced designer
and have very little time to build another site then you will want to go with
something very basic.
If you fall on either the not enough time or not enough experience end of the spectrum
then you should really consider buying a template to either make your site or at
least get you started. However if you are at the intermediate or advanced level and
have time then you should forgo the template and create a really cool design yourself.
Some of the tools that you will need to build any website are included below:
Graphics Software - The standard for creating website is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop
has a great add-on product that comes with the software that allows you to slice the
images you create and export them as html.
HTML editor - This can be anything from Microsoft Notepad all the way up to a high
end WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get and it means
that the program does the html coding for you. Some editors that you might want to
look into would be (ranked from least expensive to most) Coffee Cup HTML Editor,
Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Before you start with getting your hands dirty it is really important to lie a good
foundation for your website. In order to have a high quality website it is important
to have a good foundation and site plan before you start. In a Church, School, or
Club it is important to have a group of people working on the website planning. The
actual work might be carried out by one person but it is important to have a group
plan the site plan in order to get global perspective of the organization.
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