Guidelines for Starting Church Web Pages

Why The first step to setting up a church website, is to determine what it is that you wish to accomplish. Is the website to be informational? Is it to meet the needs of your own church family? Is it to help visitors find out more about your church before they attend? Is it to be evangelical? (Please note that non-believers will not visit a church website, except by accident.)

Website Authoring The second step is to find someone with enough expertise to be able to design the site so that it meets the needs-predetermined purposes. There are several good website authoring programs from Microsoft Front-page (which cost around $150) to freebies such as Arachnophilia which can be downloaded from the Internet. Having websites professionally designed can be quite expensive, especially if you have to pay professional fees to maintain the site very often. Look within your church for those who already have the programs and capabilities of maintaining the church site.

Website Hosting The next step is to determine where your website will be hosted (which computer connected to the Internet 24/7 will have your information stored on it) and whether you will own your own domain name (such as www.fbcanywhere.org) at a cost between $5 and $25 per year. Most webhosting services will register your domain name for you.

You can also have an informational page hosted on the ABC-USA website. (For ABC-USA churches only)

Website Maintenance If you have information on your site that changes (such as monthly calendars, or leadership lists) you will want to make sure that you stay on top on any changes that need to be posted. If you use a guestbook on your website, you will want to respond to any who signs the guestbook. If you use any forms or email feedback, you will want to make sure that someone responds within an appropriate amount of time.

Website Enhancements You can add free guestbooks, feedback forms, animated clipart, and much more available for use by downloading from the Internet. Goshen has Bibles, concordances, topical Bibles, etc. available for you to actually put onto your website without adding a great deal of storage by linking to their utilities.

Other Considerations Pictures are great, but keep in mind that pictures use storage space. Interactivity is also great, but usually takes an understanding of JAVA or PERL to enhance your site. The simplest interactivity is to link to other sites, so don’t forget a links page. And if you want to get really technical, real audio and real video are great additions to any website, but make sure that your host server supports those formats.

Additional (added in 2005) Obviously in five years technology has changed considerably (and so have prices).  While the basics above are still true, there have been some additional considerations for church websites.  In recent years the "blog" has become a popular medium for expression.  To protect the image of the church, blogs should be monitored closely, even daily.  There are some very good programs available at little or no cost to help you set up a blog, but before wading into the waters with your church website, you might want to set up a personal website and blog to confirm your ability to commit to the necessary maintenance.
Another warning: Spammers have become relentless at using email addresses which are openly used as contact information on websites. To avoid compromising your email addresses, there are several ways to maintain a contact link without using a "mail to" link which can be spotted by these abusers and their computers.