We’re so glad to hear that you’re thinking of starting up an iChurch site! By this point you’ve probably had a little think about how you’re going to go about running the site once it’s up, or indeed how you’re going to set it up in the first place. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!
Hopefully there’ll be at least a couple of you in your church who are enthusiastic about getting a website going. It’s good to meet together to share that enthusiasm! If you’re a lone wolf, get in touch with us, we’ll share your enthusiasm!
The first thing you’ll want to think about is a domain. A domain is the name for your website. In our case, interactivechurch.org.uk . Think where your web address is going to go, maybe noticeboards? Flyers? Verbally spoken to people too. All these things point towards getting a simple domain! Usually you’d want .org.uk at the end, as you’re an organisation. But you can have .co.uk , or .com or others! You can check if the domain you want is available here. You can also purchase additional domains for a small fee, and we will re-direct them all to the same site! The URC is a really great denomination for many reasons, but primarily because it’s an easy denomination to acronym, use that to your advantage!
Next, you’ll want to think about the layout of your website, how you want to structure your menu. To make life easier, iChurch has a suggested layout you can have a look at here. You don’t have to go with this one, but we’d suggest keeping your top-level menu (i.e. The main bar you can see) to no more than 6 items. You can have sub-items, even sub-sub-items! But remember KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!).
Finally, the content! What’s going to go on your website? It’s good to know exactly what’s going onto your website, and it really helps us when we make the site for you too. After all, you know more about your church than we do! Here’s just a brief, and by no means exhaustive, list of what content you’ll need to gather together:
- Contact details (minister, elders, secretary, treasurer, building users, hall lettings etc.);
- A bit of info about your minister/elders;
- What happens in an average week at your church (list of weekly activities);
- Service times/styles;
- Mission/outreach projects/community work.
- Where to find you!
- Plenty of pictures!
One of the most important things we feel your site needs to contain is, what is termed in the marketing world as, a customer journey. How does your website take someone from that first website visit, through to visiting your church (not just on a Sunday!), through to dedicating their life to Jesus. We call it the “I’m new” journey. This will be information that deliberately lacks church lingo, explains how things work at church, and how they can find out more.
To get started with your iChurch site, get in touch and we’ll set the ball rolling!
At iChurch we have no hidden costs, what you pay/see is what you get, and as this is a service from us to the church, we only aim to break even. This is so that iChurch can continue to be a mission tool for the church to help get its message out there This helps make our pricing very competitive.
Pricing is available here.