The vast majority of people in America learn through popular media. The internet is ubiquitous, efficient and very inexpensive to utilize. Your website will be your face to the world.
I’m going to walk you through getting your website up and running to reach out to people.
- Get a domain name! Go to mydomain.com or any other domain name registrar you can find through Google. Begin to check for domain names that are appropriate for your ministry. You might have to get creative and think laterally to find one that is available for you. Add your city or blog or something else to the name to make it unique and easy to find/remember.
- Now you need website hosting. There are dozens of places to use for web hosting, but some of the best that I have worked with are: HostGator & AN Hosting. I highly recommend both of these sites for their uptime, large servers and ease of use.
- Next, you need to design a site and get it filled with some content. I would suggest using Wordpress for your site’s backend management. Go to Wordpress.org to learn about it. There’s also a plethora of information at your fingertips in Google too.
- If you want to jump right in to setting up Wordpress and playing with the features and if you used one of the hosts I recommended, it is really simple. Login to your control panel and look for Fantastico. Click on it, then on the left side of the screen should be a list of applications it can install. Click on Wordpress and follow the instructions.
- Now that you have Wordpress installed, we need to find a theme. For ease of use, I would suggest looking for themes over at WooThemes. They have great support and spend a lot of time making their themes extremely user-friendly. A second option is ThemeForest. ThemeForest is a site where multiple developers come to sell their designs. Since ThemeForest is more of a broker, the support isn’t quite as good, but I have used some great themes there. For the more adventurous out there, Headway is a great theme for Wordpress that allows you to customize the site yourself.
- Phew! Domain is registered, we’ve got our hosting set up, Wordpress is online. Now we need to add some content. Login to your Wordpress site, click on Posts and get to work.
- Good news, your site is up, bad news, it’s still hard to find. Subscribe to our blog to get constant updates and new tricks to get your site to rank higher in Google, Bing and other search engines.
Now, if this is still too much or a little too technical, I have good news. You can get in contact with us and we will get you up and running, or, visit Clover. They are a great source for pre-prepared websites designed with churches in mind. Easy setup, easy maintenance. Read the write up by Kent Shaffer over at Church Relevance.
