Boosting Your Church Online When You’re Not Technical

Church IT Help
Guest Post by Garry Ponus of www.TopITInterviewQuestions.com

When I moved to the US in 2003, I did something I’d never done before.  We wanted to find a church to attend: can you guess how I found one? That’s right, I jumped onto Google.

If you want to extend the impact of your church, you’ll need to build an online presence to effectively ‘go tell it on the mountain’ or be left behind in the valley.  It’s inevitable that ‘church googling’ is happening more and more and if your church isn’t appearing when people search, you’re missing out.

Your web page says a lot – what are you saying?

In an increasingly electronic world, your web page says a lot about your church.  But what does it say?  You don’t necessarily need to have a website the quality of Hillsong or McLean Bible Church (I’ve attended both) to give a good impression.  Not everyone is looking for a big church.

On the other hand, you DO want a website that looks like it wasn’t built in ‘amateur-land’.  The look and feel of the site is very important – whether you like it or not, first impressions matter and you only have a very short time online to give people a good impression of what you’re about.  Besides, why should God or our potential visitors have our second best?

What are people searching for?

Once you have a webpage, it’s important to find out what people are searching for.  When we moved to the US, my employer had provided an apartment in Ballston VA. Can you guess what I typed?

It was “Ballston church”.  As a new person to the area with no particular denominational affiliations, this seemed the logical thing to do.  I subsequently did the same type of search when we moved to Falls Church VA – kind of funny googling “falls church church” – and every time we’ve subsequently moved since then.

What this means is as you set up your church website, you’ll need to make sure that it’s optimized for the sorts of terms that people are searching for in your area.  Some will be specific to your church, such as “St Marys Catholic Church Dubuque”.  Other terms might be more generic: “family church ballston”, “baptist church virginia”, and “pentecostal church Washington” etc.

But I’m not technical.

You wouldn’t be Robinson Crusoe if you admitted to not being technically minded and yet still want a great online presence.  Fortunately, all is not lost.  In setting up a website, many of us are going to need some technical help.

A fairly simple way to get website help is to go online.  There are various websites where you can contract IT skills to get done what you need.  Elance.com and oDesk.com are good options.  On these sites, programmers from all around the world bid for your jobs and can be WAY cheaper than if you sourced someone onsite.

The process involves specifying what you need, inviting programmers to bid, then awarding the bid to the offer you like the most.  One of the neat things about the sites, is that the programmers are ranked by users – a bit like how sellers are ranked on eBay or Amazon Marketplace– giving you an initial idea of what they’re like.

Interviewing your new programmer

One aspect that is often overlooked is interviewing your potential programmer.  If you entrust a programmer to build you a site, chances are you will end up going back to them repeatedly to get the site changed or upgraded later on.

For this reason, you want to be confident that they know their stuff before you engage their services.  IT interview questions, which can sourced online (a little risky) or prepared by a professional and bought off the shelf (modest expense but better outcomes), are a good investment.  Even for potential IT staff in other countries, an interview (quick is better than nothing) is easy and cheap to arrange via Skype or Google Chat.

Summary

Your church’s online presence says a lot about your church.  For someone who’s had no dealings with you, it will quite likely be your website that provides their first experience of what you’re like.  To make that experience positive, you need to provide a professional looking website optimized to the terms that potential attendees are likely to be searching for.

To find technical help to get you started, you can head online for a cheap and effective solution, but do your homework (by conducting an interview).  A little bit of time taken at the start of the process can save you from a world of pain and expense later on.

About the Author:

Garry Ponus is an entrepreneur with a passion for taking maximum advantage of IT solutions available to organizations of all shapes and sizes, especially for fellow non-techies. www.TopITInterviewQuestions.com was set up to help others in the same boat and provides a wealth of resources for hiring great IT staff.