Our church website at:
http://www.htpcebn.mistral.co.uk/
badly needs improving.
We don't really have anyone in the church with the time and whizzy know-how to make it happen, as far as I'm aware.
So I've agreed to look into the options, including paying someone to set it up for us. Ideadly it would be something that the office could then manage and keep up to date.
We're due to invest in an MP3 recorder when we upgrade the sound system a bit, so hopefully audio sermons can be online in the not too distant future.
We do have a church copy of Dreamweaver.
Any tips / suggestions? Reccomendations of website designers?
Loves and hates of church websites?
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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9 comments:
My top tip would be to purchase a domain. UK domains only cost £10 for two years, including VAT, and give your web address a more professional appearance. www.htpcebn.co.uk is better than htpcebn.mistral.co.uk. Better still would be eastbournechurch.co.uk (still available at time of writing).
My second top tip would be to purchase hosting. Without buying webspace on which to host your site, you are limited to your ISP (mistral) hosting the site. The domain you purchase can only redirect you there (in one of two ways: "masked" or "plain").
My recommendation for both of those is www.virtualnames.co.uk. UK domains are the standard £10 for 2 years; hosting is £20 per year, which is actually very good value. I would only not recommend them if you think the amount of stuff you'll want on the website is larger than 50MB, or if the bandwidth (amount of data people draw down from your site by browsing it) exceeds 5GB per month. Both are unlikely for a startup church site, but watch the 50MB if you start putting MP3s on there. (You'll get 4 sermons in 40MB). Get in touch if you need recommendations of hosts good for larger amounts of data, as it's a bit of a minefield but one I've traversed. (In a nutshell, beware of offers too good to be true).
What those two together (domain + hosting) give you is a professional look. Much more than that they give you a permanent place on the web. If your church changes their ISP for web access from Mistral to another, you'd have a problem. All your web addresses would change (from htpcebn.mistral.co.uk to htpcebn.mynewisp.co.uk). And, because you only borrow the webspace, rather than owning it and having control of it, you can't set up automatic redirects so that traffic to the old site still finds you. The reason that matters is that the search engines would lose your site and have to rediscover it from scratch. Bad news.
Without someone in the church to do it for you, you're going to have to find someone with the time and willing to do it for nothing, or a Christian who's willing to be a Christian in the support and aftercare that is offered but bill you appropriately. No recommendations there. But if you want a site that the office can maintain, I recommend you get someone to install and customise a "Content Management System" (CMS) for you, rather than a blank site. That way all the updating is done online (much as you upload your blog by just logging in with a password) rather than having to get under the engine yourself.
CMS wouldn't work without hosting. If you get hosting, have a play yourself with the more common ones - like the one I use (drupal). You may find it easier than you think...?!
That's a long answer. Hope it's some use. Get in touch if I can help further.
Hi James,
Thanks very much for that.
I am out of my depth here!
We already have the domain name holytrinityeastbourne.co.uk registered through easily.co.uk with nominet, and that redirects to http://www.htpcebn.mistral.co.uk/.
So am I right in thinking we want that masked so that it looks like www.holytrinityeastbourne.co.uk?
But you would switch the hosting?
Do you think it is worth also buying eastbournechurch.co.uk? It sounds like we could do that for £5 a year (which would hardly break the bank) and get it to redirect to our website?
I think we would want to put lots of MP3 files online in time so it sounds like it would be worth going for quite a large website. Recommendations would be brill.
I think the church may even be using Eclipse for its phone / broadband access from the church office. I don’t know if that’s anything to do with all this!
Re CMS: so Dreamweaver is no use for that?
Best,
Marc
Have faces on the front page. And a variety of faces - ie, men and women, young and old.
You could include a videod welcome using youtube.
As I dont know what I'm doing with all this, I wonder if we want a company in the UK we can ring up if we cant work it or if it seems bust?
I second everything James says. If you want to be able to update it yourself, and not be bound to some company that'll charge each time, get a CMS. Ever edited Wikipedia? It'll be a bit like that. I think some hosting providers offer to provide you with a CMS, but I can't recommend any as my provider doesn't.
You should really register and use www.holytrinityeastbourne.org.uk or www.eastbournechurch.org.uk - you are not a commercial company (.co.uk). I'd go for the former; it may be longer, but it's really obvious what people should type.
Whichever domains you register, make them all redirect to one, and use that one in all your publicity.
Gerv
I've noticed a number of church websites that don't give you any names/photos/contact details for actual people, just a generic 'contact the church office'. I realise there may be reasons for this but I find it very offputting.
I should have thought that names of staff (with friendly photos if you can manage it) and email addresses would be an important way of welcoming the random visitor to your site.
You'll need to decide if the site is primarily intended for the outsider or the church member. I firmly believe that the front page should be for the outsider with clear links to the things they might be interested in. You can have a separate section with information/notices etc. for the church members, possibly password protected if you like.
Well, James sounds like he knows what he's talking about. A content management system is the way to go, and open source is cheap and easy to use. I set up a site with Joomla! at www.museumprofessionalsgroup.org with a hosting company called Net Explorers (http://www.hosting-netexplorers.co.uk/) who will sort out your domain and set up the content management framework for you. However, it would be useful to have someone who is a bit technical set up your site so that you can then just go and change the bits you want when you want. I have a friend at Church who is a designer and has done a course in developing websites using Joomla! so I'll ask her whether she would be willing to do work for HT Eastbourne on their website. She is very reasonable in her costs (we think she doesn't charge enough for great work), so I'll ask her to get in touch with you if she's interested.
Sian
Thanks, Sian. We'd be interested to hear from her.
Best, Marc
Morning Marc
I've noticed that a number of church websites use ChurchInsight. Here's a bit of blurb from their site:
"he ChurchInsight system is developed and supplied by Endis Ltd, a software solutions provider specialising in web application development.
Incorporated in 1998 as a limited company, Endis made its name within the world of financial services, delivering time and cost efficiencies to banks and securities firms by web-enabling customer facing processes. Founded by Christians, we wanted to tithe our time and skills and in 2001 we developed a community based web site for a local church. The success of the site encouraged us to develop a scalable system that we could make available to others, and ChurchInsight was born - enabling churches and charities to make real use of the web."
And so it goes on. More at www.churchinsight.com. But that's all a bit dull; what you want to see is said sites in action.
Examples include:
http://smb.org.uk/ [St Mary's, Bredin]
http://www.winslowcf.org/ [Winslow Christian Fellowship]
And there are loads more at
http://www.churchinsight.com/group/group.aspx?id=8179
All looks very easy to update and all that kind of thing, and all sorts of bits and pieces can be done via the ChurchInsight system (including rotas, sermon recordings, bla bla bla).
BUT it does look like there is a monthly charge. Worth looking into, anyhow...
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