Web Presence: Easy Stuff

I've recently explained why I feel a church should be concerned with its web presence not just its website.  I also mentioned some habits I have personally that I feel make a small difference in this area.  In this post I'll share some of the easy, intermediate, and difficult things that I think can help a church to get momentum in their web presence.  I'm far more an observer and hobbiest in this arena so those with more professional experience can correct me or add to the list as desired.

Easy Things To Improve Your Web Presence:

1. Identify and connect with the people who are trusted and respected in your church who already spend a good deal of time online.  See where they go and what they do to plan how you might celebrate, participate, and connect with that.  Read the RSS feeds and send links to your team sharing new developments in their life.  The big one here for churches today is Facebook.
2. Encourage your church members who have websites, social networking profiles, and blogs to put a link to your church. 
3. Find out what your church members and leaders are doing online and connect with them.  Comment on their blogs, friend them on facebook, watch their videos, etc.
4. Keep an eye out for things going on in your community that are consistent with your mission and celebrate those things by writing a short article for your site or blog.  Link to the event.  If  someone is paying attention to the traffic coming to their site they will connect back with your site if it was the source of their traffic.  You may be able to comment on their page and put your own link back to your article.

Intermediate Things to Improve Your Church's Web Presence:

1. Observe the activity on your site through tools like Google Analytics.
2. Use Google's Webmaster tools to understand how search engines see your site.
3. Research your church site's placement in key Google searches and track how this is changing over time.
4. Encourage your staff to blog, twitter, read blogs and comment on blogs.  Provide guidelines to set good expectations.  Allow for time during work hours for this as long as it is directly related to ministry and not strickly personal
5. Encourage your staff to engage with their counterparts at other churches online as part of their continuing education.  Expect each ministry leader and director to be able to tell you 5 to 10 sites and blogs they follow.
6. Require a written ministry update each week from your team.  A single paragraph or two is all you need.  Once they are writing stuff you can start directing those efforts towards the web.  Assign someone to pull the public content and post it.  You could even have a private blog where these are posted.
7. Consider a blog for your church family if your church website is hard to keep up-to-date.  Ask your webmaster to automatically display the headlines from the church blog on the church website.

Difficult Things To Improve Your Web Presence:

1. Hire staff that already use the web in their daily lives and ministries.
2. Convince your senior pastor to blog at least 3-5 posts per week.  Hopefully he has a life and people will get to see a little of it.
3. Develop conversion goals and begin to track whether you are succeeding at getting people to engage your website in the way you planned.  This is one we aren't doing much yet at Oasis Church beyond tracking RSS feeds and podcast subscriptions.
4. Develop a few compelling reasons why someone who lives in your community would want to visit your church website even if they had no need or desire to visit your church.  This could be that you do weddings, baby dedications, a Christmas program, concerts, cover local events, etc.
5. Get 1% of the people who attend your church to direct traffic to your website in a single month through some kind of link to us campaign.

When re-designing your site, Avoid Web 1.0 syndrome as much as you can:

1. Host images and videos on common sites like YouTube and Flickr
2. Embed content on your site from those sites
3. Don't live in an 800x600 box.  Put lots of interesting stuff on the home page.  Note that less than 7% of visitors are in the low resolution.  You do not need to build your website for them.
4. Don't discourage visitors or waste their time by have flash intro page or routing page. 
5. Remember that images and flash are supposed to highlight and attract people to the information.  They are not the best means to actually convey the information.
6. Avoid the temptation to create a page for every thing your church has ever done.  Lump some things together and keep your site flat and easier to navigate.
7. Avoid as much as possibly trying to teach the casual guest your church's language and strategy on your website (I'm wasting my time here).
8. Focus on letting traffic flow through your site instead of trying to make your site about keeping guests.  Make it desireable to return, but know that you get a certain kind of credit online from other sites when you send traffic their way. 
9. Build your site with friendly link names.  Avoid a Content Management System that makes everything "mysite.com/pageID=##".  It is much better to have "mysite.com/worship" or "mysite.com/children"

While I welcome corrections and additions to my list, please not that I start from the premise that you want to reach people with the Gospel.  If your church is a holy huddle or has a hide-from-the-world mentality I am sure you'll balk at engaging secular services and social networking sites.  Feel free to post comments reflecting the web version of KJV only mentality, but know that I could care less.

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