Christian Web Resources

Carnuke's short and basic FAQ about the Article module based on forum posts, Q&As and his own testing, as well as a brief introduction to "Article" template management

As someone making an entry to the web for your church or ministry, you might think it rather simple, given the number of easily available tools. Or, you might find it too complex, given the myriad of choices and options you face. In either case, having somewhere to turn for guidance makes your job less challenging.

A logical place to turn is someone who has already done what you are hoping to do and has a similar mission. Larger churches and denominations certainly fit this role and are good starting places. However, they vary greatly in the resources they use and make available on their websites.

Here's an overview of several large denominations and the resources they offer, along with some of their own practices.

Millions of people are on the Internet every day - how do you get just some of them to visit your site? Here are some easy to follow guidelines for building your site to draw people to it. Start by looking at the URL, the title and the description of each page.

Once you make the decision to move ahead and build or update your church website, you need to choose the platform you will build it with. What are your choices and how will you make the decisions you are faced with? Here's a look at a baker's dozen of top content management systems and how they compare for church websites and how should you evaluate them.

Search engines and users rely on you to provide information about your site's content - leverage your XOOPS meta tags and begin to improve your position on search engine results page (SERPs)

There are numerous web sites devoted to the technical, design aesthetics and usability aspects of web sites, but few help you with the editorial aspect (content) of your site. We start a discussion about what (and what not) to put on your church's web site.

There are some differences in creating content for the web compared to preparing content for print distribution - your web site will work if you can successfully translate your offline publishing activities to online equivalents and making them work in a web environment.

One of the first features you will want to consider carefully for your church or ministry site is the ability to accept prayer requests. People everywhere have joys and concerns they can offer in prayer and your web site can be part of their prayer lives. The web offers global availability - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But, it will be up to you to connect with those people and their prayers.

Recently on Church Marketing Sucks, Brad Abare posted a series on producing church web sites that don't suck. Let's face it - it is just as easy to produce a web site that sucks as it is to create one that doesn't suck. Follow these tips so your site is good for more than just serving as a bad example.

As a web master, at some point you will undoubtedly begin to work on your search engine optimization, or think you need to work on optimizing your site for the search engines. Before you do, read this article and stop to think about who's more important - your readers or the robots?