Websites Needed for Successful Church Marketing Plan

Websites - The church / parish website and website management software are needed for a successful church marketing plan. It is often where parish information is initially found.

The website is often one of the first places that potential families and parishioners get an overall feel and basic appreciation of the potential for their involvement in parish life.


Creating a Website - Background

Investigation in this area is critical.

The church will need expertise to create and then continually update a good website.

The initial construction of the website may come from staff, IT skilled parishioners, school IT staff or from outside consultants.

The continual updating would best be done within the parish. In-servicing staff for making these updates would be money well spent.

An option, I have found very beneficial, follows.


Management Software

Another option is to have the website embedded in to management software which allows for management of the site. This takes the site beyond the static and into the realm of continual fluid development – Web 2.0.

The expense of this option is not considerable and with negotiation within the field a reasonable monthly cost would be expected. I would suggest speaking with trusted others in deciding on the businesses offering this support. (See ‘Website Management Software Sample’ in 'Internet Applications...' chapter for a specific example.)

This software allows for various detailed reports of website usage. It could include:

• the whereabouts in the world of visitors to your site
• number of webpages they visited
• the content viewed from webpages and applications they visited
• where they entered and exited the website
• who is exploring your site, through IP (Internet Protocol) addresses
• the browsers they used to link to your website
• any commercial activities you may have as part of your website, etc.

This allows for the non-IT expert to update the website regularly, from uploading photos, literature items, to adding webpages, blogs, galleries of photos and videos, etc.

There are numerous other capacities depending on the management software.

More detail showing the necessity of Websites for Churches and Website Management Software to a successful church marketing plan may be found in the e-book: Church Marketing Manual for the Digital Age (2nd ed) 2010 by Bryan Foster.