Discover how to leverage technology in your church

If you work at a church and are responsible for designing graphics but aren’t a graphic designer, you’ve likely pulled your hair out a time or two. If you don’t have experience in graphic design, it can be hard to come up with fresh ideas that look the way you want them to. 

Churches often look to rank themselves on Google with SEO, so that they can reach more people for the sake of the Gospel. Local SEO is a subset of SEO, or search engine optimization, that allows your business to appear specifically in search results for your area—because you wouldn’t want your church to appear to someone located five hundred miles away. 

Your church website home page is the first page visitors will see when they come to your site. To that end, it’s important for this page to include all the information they’d need to understand what your church believes, how they can attend services, and how they can reach you.

What’s the first thing you see when you go to your church website? It’s likely some sort of image with text or your logo over it. This graphic is called a website banner, and it’s a crucial part of any successful church website design. 

Having a website is a non-negotiable for churches today—but having a good website is even better! If you don’t have a marketing or communications team, it can be overwhelming to figure out what information should be on your website.

In 1997, back in the dark ages of the internet, I wrote my first website. I wrote it, but I didn’t publish it because, honestly, I didn’t know how. It wasn’t a great website, but I was proud of it.

I wasn’t even a teenager yet, but I was fascinated by computers and especially the internet. Creating a website seemed like a fun challenge, so I did what is almost unheard of now: I went to the library and borrowed a book about how to write Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language of the internet.

In my last post, I laid out what landing pages are and why they are important in communicating to your target audience. I wrote about how the retail industry uses landing pages, and hopefully you did your homework to see how effectively the industry uses them to communicate targeted information to its customers.

Landing pages. Maybe you have heard of them before, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you know all about them, maybe you don’t. Landing pages are not new, and we have all been sent to one, whether we knew it or not.

Maybe you’re just now considering creating a landing page for your church, or maybe you’re a website designer who’s looking to take your site to a new level. In this first of a series of posts, I’ll help you navigate the basics of landing pages and learn how they can be used for specific opportunities and events for your church.

I love how diverse our churches are. Of course, we all have the Gospel in common, and we also share many similar rites and ceremonies, but the way we dress, the type of music we use, and the way our churches operate varies greatly depending on our context.

Sociologists maintain that you can learn a lot about looking in people’s medicine cabinets. In the same vein, I believe a narthex tells a lot about a congregation. When I visit a congregation, I notice so many things: