What does your church’s online presence look like? Hopefully your church has a website, at least—and hopefully it’s one that communicates your church’s message clearly, and not a website that looks like it belongs in the past decade. But even if your church’s website needs some serious help (and even a well-designed church site needs periodic review and updates), here are a few tools to help you, all from the Internet Evangelism Day website.
- First up is a very thorough 55-question church website quiz you can take to find out how your church website is doing. The quiz isn’t meant to be a list of set-in-stone guidelines—you might disagree with a few items, or some of them might not apply to your church’s site—but walking through this quiz is a great way to make sure you’re thinking about all the right questions. Notice that plenty of the questions are strategic rather than technical; these are questions to talk through with your entire church leadership, not just with the person who designed/is designing your site.
- A good follow-up to the quiz is IED’s list of 70+ tips for effective church websites. Lots of good discussion-starters, covering both technical and strategic aspects.
- It’s important to get your church’s website working effectively for your ministry. But it would be a mistake to assume that just having a website covers all of the necessary bases of your internet presence—what about social networking, blogging, and mobile devices? The IED site has a good overview of how to incorporate social networking sites like Facebook into your church’s ministry, as well as corresponding pages on ministry blogging and mobile devices.
Don’t let your church settle for an ineffective online presence—read through these resources and see what you can apply to your church’s website and internet ministry.
