How to write web content that your congregation and search engines love
Many churches are aware that they need a website, but few actually give any thought as to the content (text, audio and visuals) and how it can be maintained when it goes live. But, the truth is that a website with fresh content is likely to have a higher engagement rate and return visitors than a static website.
In addition, the most important factor in getting a high ranking on Google is quality content - preferably fresh.
What has Google and search engine rankings got to do with my church website, I hear you ask?
A lot, as it happens. Your church website is your online ‘shop window’ and, by default, your opportunity to showcase what you have to offer the world. If your shop window is dull, it goes without saying that no one will buy what you are selling.
But, how do you create a website that attracts seekers as well as engages your current congregation? Our quick guide will show you how.
Define your website’s audience
Who is your website for? Most churches have a vague idea of their website’s target audience: ‘seekers and the current congregation’. However, it needs to be more specific. For example, if your church has a particular ministry for families or businesses, then they would be your church’s website target audience.
Remember, your website is for your audience, not for you
The best church websites are outward-looking. It is a sad-but-true fact that we live in a what-in-it-for-me world. If your website is too focussed on your church and what it’s doing (‘we are…’, ‘we did’, as opposed to ‘you will find a warm welcome’, ‘your pastor is…’), it will seem too inward-looking and find it harder to attract visitors.
Your content should reflect the needs of your audience
If you know who you’re writing for, then you will know the best way to communicate with them. Beware of Christianese. ‘The glory of God’ makes perfect sense to your congregation but it sounds like mumbo-jumbo to the seeker who’s landed on your website via Google. Write to inform, engage and inspire.
Draw up a content plan to manage what goes on your website
Managing your website’s content can seem like an onerous task. But, with a simple content plan, you can schedule the articles and audio content to put up on the site. ChurchInsight’s Content Management System (CMS) has a great scheduling tool to help you do this.
Writing for the web is different from writing for print
When you’re writing your church website content, bear in mind that people do not read web content – they scan it. So, keep your content lean. Use subheadings to break up your articles and if your article is too long, serialise.
Optimise your website for search
A well-optimised website makes it easy for people who are already searching for churches in your local area to find you online. It also helps your search engine rankings in Google. The higher up the search engine ranking your church website is, the more visible it is and, potentially more visitor traffic will be directed towards your website.
Check your grammar and spelling
Badly written content gives the impression that your church is untrustworthy. It also reflects badly on Whom you serve. So, check your spelling.
Over to you, how do you keep your church’s website content fresh and the visitors coming?
Abidemi Sanusi is the founder of www.thereadywriter.co.uk, a content writing and training agency. She is also the editor of www.readywritermag.com, an online magazine for Christians who write.
If you have any questions or would like more information about this blog post, or ChurchInsight, please get in touch via email to hello@churchinsight.com, or connect on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus.
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Abidemi Sanusi, 13/05/2013 |
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May. 2013: New features & fixes
The tech team have been busy over these past few weeks with some new features as well as fixing a whole ton of stuff and making it work better.
Better editing on the iPad
We found that folks encountered a number of issues when editing on the iPad: Now, when you select an article to edit it on an iPad, it opens in a new browser tab – this simple change has enabled us to fix many of these problems.
In-browser PDF & document viewing
 If you linked to an uploaded PDF or other document in an article or email, the PDF always downloaded. That's OK, but sometimes people didn't know where to look for it.
There's now a neat option to "Attempt to open file in browser" (set in the uploaded document's properties) which means for common formats like PDF the document will be displayed in the browser for many users, making it easier and quicker to access and read.
Important: Being able to view a PDF like this is a function of more modern browser versions, so make sure you (or those who you want to read the document online) have got a recent version, otherwise it will just download as before.
If the option is left unticked, the document will simply be downloaded as currently.
Improved layout loading speed for large sites
Opening a layout for editing on sites with large numbers of groups could take 20-30 seconds. We've made some optimisations here that should make a significant improvement. (If you want to know, we re-greased the hamsters that work the little wheels in the big computer box thingy)
iCal multi-day events
All-day events of more than one day ended up multiplying when the site's iCal feed was viewed. We've whipped 'em back into shape and things are now are all tickety-boo.
Group tree in Chrome
The Group/Site tree didn't always refresh immediately to show changes in the Chrome browser (not so shiny, eh?) when changes were made to group names or group structure. That's all sorted and it's as (re)fresh(ed) as a daisy.
Query Wizard – user's photos
You can now run a query to find users who do or don't have photos on their personal profiles and email them, encouraging the latter to upload an image, thus making your site more friendly (hopefully).
Other new stuff
These will make some of you happy; others will go "Huh?" Don't worry if you're in the latter group.
Auto subscribe to social notifications
Users now get automatic notifications of connections and new private messages by default, rather than having to explicitly subscribe.
Acceptable Use Policy
This can now be edited using the normal document editor. (I know – at last, your life feels complete.)
Stuff which we fixed/made work better
There's a whole sack full of stuff in this section – 28 fixes in all, but I won't bore you with them all – read the official release notes for the details. Meanwhile, here are some highlights:
Removing users via the Involvement tab
Sometimes you need to remove someone from your site and if you did this by deselecting them from all the groups they were a member of via their Involvement tab you got an error. (This is a smart approach as it enables you to easily check they're not members of any Independent group as well.) You can now remove people with non-erroring dastardly despicableness.
Editing buttons in Chrome
Chrome's been keeping us busy – the Cut, Copy & Paste buttons were disabled in the article editor. This is due to a browser security limitation. The buttons are now enabled but show a message about this. The workaround is to use the keyboard equivalents of these buttons Ctrl+X/Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V (Mac – for Ctrl use Cmd)
Query wizard & IE 10
Those pesky guys at Microsoft had been up to their tricks again and the Query builder wizard didn't work in Internet Explorer 10. We sat it down and gave it a stiff talking-to and it's all fine now.
Improved form erroring
If one of the input fields on a form was given a name of "name" (who would have seen that coming?) the form would error. That's now fixed.
Other things we fixed
There are a whole ton of things the team fixed in this release – see the full release notes for more information.
Got any comments? Want to talk to us? Email
iPad image © dandaman – fotolia.com |
Alistair Birch, 01/05/2013 |
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XL-Mentoring: Making a Difference
CEO Patrick Regan's Intro video
We are working closely with XLP (xlp.org.uk) to deliver a fantastic looking site to highlight their project, XL-Mentoring (xlm.org.uk). The site went live at Spring Harvest this Easter and there has already been a great response from people wanting to be involved.
XLP get their message across with some great videos which are embedded in their site. The home page content draws the reader down the page further giving them the opportunity to learn more about the initiative and download the info pack.
Started in 2008, XLP’s XL-Mentoring project (XLM) has proven highly effective in supporting young people who are facing emotional, behavioural and relational challenges and their families. The project is helping them to choose to:
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Improve behaviours, self-esteem & life skills.
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Stay in school and succeed in education.
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Improve relationships with family, peers teachers and others in the community.
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Set goals for the future and work hard to achieve them
See the site and learn more about XL-Mentoring. Make sure you download the info pack and get involved!
If you have any questions or would like more information about this blog post, or ChurchInsight, please get in touch via email to hello@churchinsight.com, or connect on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. |
Adam Johannes, 04/04/2013 |
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Feb. 2013: New features & fixes
The development team elves have been burning the midnight oil to give us some new features and a whole shedload of bug fixes.
Multiple Bible references on recordings
For all you preachers out there or who upload media content of sermons: More than one Bible reference can now be added to a single recording and chapter/verse ranges are more flexible to accommodate references spanning multiple chapters.
NB. With existing recordings, it wasn't possible to move some old references to the new system if they weren't in a standard format. If this is the case, they can't be edited and will need to be deleted and re-added.
Navigation sleight of hand – redirect menu items
You can now set up a group homepage to redirect somewhere else in the system so that when someone clicks on an item in your navigation menu, it takes them somewhere else. This means menu items can now go to other pages in the system or to other pages outside the group structure – or even the site.
For example, you might want to create a Sermons group which redirects to your Audio/Video page; have a normal Alpha or Christianity Explored course group, but also have another menu item called "Discover God" which redirects to those groups as not everyone knows what they stand for. You could create other links to the Address Book or Calendar in the main site navigation via the "System Page" option, rather than just having these links on the Home menu.
 You used to be able to do this, but it required fiddling around with source code, which not everyone's happy with. So, the forward is now easily set in the Advanced Options of the Group at the top near the security settings.
Scheduling mailings – more precision
 You can now schedule mailings to be sent more precisely: It's been possible to choose a date in the future when a mailing is sent for a while now, but you can now specify the time as well.
Scheduled mailings can be set up when you have 100 or more recipients – they're ideal if you're wanting to create a mailing to go out while you're away on holiday or get a series of mailings set up in one go to send at regular intervals.
Other new stuff
Membership List – sort User List
The User List Component lists all the people in a Group when inserted in a Layout (the Component is found under the User Details section) – ideal for showing all the people who are in your small group or team. You can now control the order of these better – by first name, last name, country or state.
If you've not used this Component, it's worth experimenting with – you can list members of a Group, a family or the logged-in user's "Connections" (like 'friends' in Facebook), show all kinds of user information and the names can link to the users' profiles, show phone numbers etc. NB. It would be normal to set this Component to only display to Logged-in Users and therefore be hidden from site visitors who weren't church members/site members.
Techy/Designer things
If you're of a nervous, non-technical disposition, look away now... and continue reading further down the page.
Doctype upgrade
 Internet Explorer does some weird stuff. E.g. things that look good in other browsers don't in our (not) beloved IE. This is often due to the 'doctype' setting.
The doctype can now be set on a per-layout basis. This should allow you to to design pages for IE in 'standards mode' and get round some of the problems you may have encountered before. Keep us in touch with how you're using this.
Multiple navigation components on the same layout
For technical reasons, until this release it was only possible to have one Group Navigation component in a Layout. However, you can now have multiple Group Nav components in the same Layout, allowing more flexiblity when creating or amending your site design. This gives designers greater control over styling the navigation using custom css.
One of the designers who requested this comments,
"It means I can now dynamically build a main navigation menu, group navigation and footer links from the group navigation component and output them as an unordered list – and display the menu on the same page (whereas I was limited to only one of these per page previously).
"Outputting as an unordered list means they are easier to style (through custom css) and are more lightweight in terms of the HTML they output."
Other new stuff
Warn when auto-changing members' privacy settings
When trying to save a user record with privacy settings that don't make sense/are contradictory (e.g. Connections can see less than site members) we now automatically reset these to something more sensible and alert the user to what's been done.
Highlight credit/debit card revalidation text in the checkout
When a paying for something with an existing card and this needs revalidating, we've made this alert/information much clearer for the user so they don't miss it and get stuck.
Update system with new Endis address
The Cambridge end of Endis operations moved home recently, so we updated the Terms & Conditions page and the Endis Insight profile with the new Musgrave Farm, Cambridge address. The team are now based in a former cowshed. All comments should be directed to them... ;)
Other things we fixed
There are a whole ton of things the team fixed in this release (including some important Resources issues) – see the full release notes for more information.
Got any comments? Want to talk to us? Email
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Alistair Birch, 12/02/2013 |
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Three more church websites for inspiration
It is great to see churches and ministries producing very different websites out of the same system. Three more ChurchInsight inspirations today – each with its own needs and approach, each with elements to inspire us all.
ChurchInsight is a website system for churches and ministries used widely in the UK and US. Try our free trial here to see if it would work for your organisation.
Terry Virgo
Terry Virgo is a communicator. You can’t tell from the screenshot, but the front page of his website is quite long, taking space for summaries of his latest blog posts. In doing this, his voice is clearly heard on the front page, setting the tone for the whole site.
The website is all about Terry Virgo’s articles, audio recordings and books. To help users browse through the catalogue, there is a fat nav drop down from the main menu – a wide drop down box with lots of links. The site also has an A-Z list of topics in the Resources Library and a content rich footer, useful when you’ve scrolled to the bottom of a long page.
The visual appeal is obvious, with a balanced layout and use of colour, using green sparingly as a feature against the grey. A few rounded corners take the harshness out of the blocks. I like the partial use of shadow down the sides, and the well-proportioned carousel of links.
All Souls Langham Place
Similar to Terry Virgo’s site, All Souls also have a row of image links in letterbox dimensions across the middle of the page. They are overlaid with text and sit under a scrolling hero image.
One thing stands out that not many churches go for – Facebook, right in the middle of the page. Featuring an active social media account in this way immediately conveys a sense of community and activity, and encourages people to join in.
It’s a busy website, but presents the visitor key information about when the church meets through the events column, and offers sermons in audio to get a flavour of the church. Altogether, easy to see what is going on, easy to get in touch.
Serve
Serve is an alliance of Christian organisations who support churches to transform their communities. On their website, they’ve made a bold choice and gone for blue in a big way, with yellow highlights.
It works because they’ve carried it out with conviction. Many different shades make up the whole. The site is uncluttered, with the most important items in their own boxes.
Real photography rotating in the centre gives the website, and the organisation, a soul. I like the clear newsletter sign up on the right, and the clever expanding menu for resources underneath.
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Adam Johannes, 02/01/2013 |
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