Designing A Powerful Church Website

The iChurch Group is a consulting team that strives to pair Apostolic churches with the best WordPress designers. Our desire is to see churches receive amazing websites that they can update and continue to use for years to come.

This post is a guide to help you create the very best content for our designers.

If your design requires another page or two, please let us know. Also, if you have noticed a feature somewhere else that you would like to see included in your site design, let us know. Please provide a link to an example, and we will strive to make it happen.

Finally, we suggest you allow a professional editor the opportunity to proof your text copy prior to sending it back to us. If you do not have an editor, we can provide editing. The fee is based upon the overall site word-count.

SUGGESTED WEB MENU/PAGES:

• Home—A top-level main menu, slider, and three main buttons. Social media icons built in.

• New Here—Put yourself into the unchurched person’s mindset… what could you tell them that could ease their anxiety about visiting? What to expect, Where to park, childcare?

• Contact Us—A place to provide location data, web form, and other contact info, such as a church email address.

• About Us/Beliefs—Tell your story. Where did this church come from? Prior buildings, remodels, other projects… catch them up. Tell people what you believe. Doctrine, worship, prayer. Explain yourself and use some scripture.

• Photo Album—This is an area that some churches really depend on, while others omit. Let us know if you want this page. Galleries can be great if done correctly; if not, they can be detrimental.

• Pastor’s Blog—One of the most important pages on your whole site. Tell people who you are by talking about current events, current sermons, etc. If they can read your blog and like you, they will probably love your preaching.

• Ministries—What does your church do exceptionally well? Do not feel compelled to list every single ministry you have… but tell of the ones most people are looking for, i.e., children’s ministry, student ministry, singles, etc. Sound technicians and door greeter ministry are not really needed here.

• Online Giving—Let us know the service you have set up for accepting online contributions. If nothing is set-up, we suggest PayPal because it is free on a monthly basis. You only pay when someone uses it. PayPal will charge about 3% for each transaction. No real need to go to a paid service until your monthly volume reaches $1500 per month.

• Podcast—-We use sermon.net for almost every application. It is a great company and very affordably priced for both streaming and achieved services. It is also a widely known content distribution network for sermons. This helps create more connections with others searching for spiritual content.

KEY FEATURES:
• A clean and modern WordPress design
• Home page features a slider which can be easily updated
• All text within page body can be easily edited
• Embedded media player from www.sermon.net for podcasting functionality !• Facebook and Twitter integration
• Fully responsive site build (mobile friendly)
• Client owns website outright
• No hidden monthly fees
• Client chooses their own hosting company (we are available to host)

Please contact us if you have further questions. We are here to help!