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<h1 align="center">Building a Church Website</h1>
<p align="center">From the:</p>
<p align="center">Building a group Website Series</p>
<p align="center">By <a href="http://www.crowntemplates.com/">CrownTemplates</a></p>
<p> Have you been asked to build a website for your church?
Building There are thousands of people building websites everyday.
It is becoming increasingly important for many small organizations and groups to
build their online presence. This helps in getting their ideals, goals,
and mission out to the general public. Therefore at an increasing rate
many of us with computer skills are asked by organizations to put together a
website. This happened to me about two years ago when the school I worked
at asked me to build a website for them to help advertise their special arts
programs. </p>
<p> The only problem with this is many of us do not have the
skills nor the time to build and keep up a whole site. It takes a lot to
be the webmaster of a website and it is no simple task. However often it
is too expensive to pay a web designer to build a custom site for an
organization and so the task often falls to an armature or even some one with no
experience. This is what happened to me with the website that I build for
my school. I didn't have the first clue about website design or html.
So that forced me to learn the basics and use what tutorials and templates that
i could find online. I made it through the experience and like many others
found that it was a lot of fun. Therefore I started building a bunch of
other sites. I would bet that this happens to many.</p>
<p> This article will help the beginning web designer or even
volunteer set up a basic Church website. However since there is not a lot
of money to spend on the project and often people have really unrealistic ideas
about what a website can do we will give you some good guidelines and tips to
get started.</p>
<p> The first thing that you need to have a real good idea
about is your level of experience with building websites. It is really
important to be honest with yourself and the church that you belong to in order
to create a realistic expectation. If you are a beginner then it is fine
to admit that, we all have to start somewhere. However, if you are a
beginner don't plan on building an elaborate SQL php backend that can be
dynamically updated or anything like that. Below I have provided some
basic definitions of skill level that might help you assess where you are at.</p>
<ol>
<li>Beginner - You are this level fall anywhere in between never setting up a
site to having built a site or two with an online website builder or a pre
made website like those provided on Yahoo, or AngelFire. </li>
<li>Intermediate - If you have either set up a website with an online builder
and customized the site some or built a website using a template then you fall
into the intermediate category. </li>
<li>Advanced - You have set up many sites before and often use templates
for ideas but tweak them so much they hardly resemble the template when you
are finished.</li>
</ol>
<p> How you choose to build your website depends largely on
two factors, your time commitment to the project and your skill level.
These two factors have a strong correlation between them. Meaning if you
have lots of time and are a beginning you will be able to build more advanced
websites. However if you are an advanced designer and have very little
time to build another site then you will want to go with something very basic.
If you fall on either the not enough time or not enough experience end of the
spectrum then you should really consider buying a template to either make your
site or at least get you started. However if you are at the intermediate
or advanced level and have time then you should forgo the template and create a
really cool design yourself.</p>
<p> Some of the tools that you will need to build any website
are included below:</p>
<ol>
<li>Graphics Software - The standard for creating website is Adobe Photoshop.
Photoshop has a great add-on product that comes with the software that allows
you to slice the images you create and export them as html.</li>
<li>html editor - This can be anything from Microsoft Notepad all the way up
to a high end WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What
You Get and it means that the program does the html coding for you. Some
editors that you might want to look into would be (ranked from least expensive
to most) Coffee Cup HTML Editor, Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver.</li>
</ol>
<p> Before you start with getting your hands dirty it is
really important to lie a good foundation for your website. In order to
have a high quality website it is important to have a good foundation and site
plan before you start. In a Church, School, or Club it is important to
have a group of people working on the website planning. The actual work
might be carried out by one person but it is important to have a group plan the
site plan in order to get global perspective of the organization. During
this stage it is important to gather ideas, thought, and and opinions and get
them down on paper. As the group refines their plans it is important to
come up with a site map. A site map is a graphical representation of every
page that will be on the website and how they will connect to each other.
It is also important to get some basic ideas on the layout of the site.</p>
<p> Next you can go online and check find the templates that
are available. Look around and find different ideas and templates.
If you are like many people you might find that one template does not work.
I often want a part of one and part of another template. If this is the
case and you are experienced it is not really a problem but if you are new to
website design then you might want to pay someone to customize the site for you.
You can see some resources on our site dealing with template customization and
templates.</p>
<p> It is important now if possible to assign sections of the
website to different individuals. They don't even need any experience with
website design. If they can type you will be able to use them.
Assign sections to each member of the team to complete. That team member
will then work on their own computer in Microsoft word or a simple text editor
to create the text and collect any graphics, pictures, or sounds that they would
like to add to the site. </p>
<p>Below is a list of some of the content areas that you might want to include
on a church website</p>
<ol>
<li> Events</li>
<li>Services</li>
<li>Calendar</li>
<li>About the Priest or Pastor</li>
<li>Church's Mission Statement</li>
<li>gallery of recent church activity</li>
<li>picture tour of the church</li>
<li>Sunday school or singles groups etc.</li>
</ol>
<p> Each member can then turn in their section of the website
on a disk to you and you will compile all of them onto the actual website.
You can often do this by a simple cut and past command in most WYSIWYG editors.
It is important at this stage to name all of the files in a consistent way and
stick to the site map. If you make changes to the site as you are building
make sure you reflect these changes on your site map. It can become very
easy to build a huge website with literally 1,000's of of files including
images, html documents and much more. If you are not consistent with your
file naming and site map then you will not be able to update or make changes tot
he website because you will be lost. </p>
<p> Once your website if complete you will need to find a host
and upload it to the host. If you have trouble at this stage typically the
host will help you with it. After your site is up then you will breathe a
big sigh of relief and feel like you don't want to see the site ever again.
However the work has only really begun because website are constantly evolving
an have to reflect what is happening in the world and your organization.
So your work has only begun. You will now need to work to publicize your
site sot hat people can find it and you will need to continually update the site
and keep the content fresh and up to date.</p>
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<td>This article was written by: Chris Ryerson who is the owner and designer
of over 10 sites that are currently on the web. If you are interested in
reading this article and other articles like it you can go here
<a href="http://www.crowntemplates.com/articles.html">Crown Templates Articles</a>.
You may also want to check out the wide variety of
<a href="http://www.crowntemplates.com">Templates and Free Webmaster tools at
Crown Templates</a></td>
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