Creating A Church Website

Two months ago Pastor Rick asked our youth Bible study class if we would make a web site for the church. The goal of the website would be to help new residents find our church online. The only specifications he gave us were that it had to look pretty and it had to have solid directions from all of the neighboring highways so that people could find us easier. He did want us to try and keep the cost of making and maintaining the site to a minimum as our funds our limited to church donations.

I have made a few hobby sites in the past, so I said that I would do it. The first thing I looked into was free web sites. I figured there is nothing less expensive than free. I let the Pastor know that we could get a decent free site to use and he gave me the green light.

The first type of free web site I looked into was a Wordpress blog. I figured that these are easy and simple to set up so it wouldn’t take much time. However, the more I thought about it, the more I knew that I had to find something better. Wordpress is great for quickly getting messages out, but I wanted to draw people into the church so that they could feel as great as I do each Sunday.

Pastor Rick and I determined that we needed a site that would really stand out from the crowd. What I really needed was a flash web site. Using flash I could create some great animations and videos to really showcase what our church has to offer. Site visitors that are impressed by the site might end up coming to the church. Conversely a poorly made web site might keep people from wanting to visit so I knew I had to do a good job.

The first thing I did was to search the Internet for a free flash site. This proved harder than I thought it would, but eventually I found a great free website. I found this through an article I read about a student creating a free flash site for his school project. This person had found the ultimate free site that let you use all kinds of flash applications. The free site even came with a multitude of templates to choose from. I got to use flash animations and didn’t even have to code.

We used a local Minneapolis seo company to optimize the website for more free search engine traffic. This organization created back links and optimized our on page site structure. The process was so simple on our end.

Well two months later we got a new family to come to our church. Pastor Rick asked them who referred them, and they said a web site they found online.