Develop or build your church website

Often on the wish-list for churches will be a new (or rebuilt) website. We’ve put together some basic considerations to help get the ball rolling.
View our current list of church websites
We’ve also setup a Facebook group to share issues/advice
See also: Livestreaming guidance

A Church Near You

Some churches/parishes use https://www.achurchnearyou.com (ACNY) exclusively as their main website – each church has a free listing and can develop it to add pages, images etc – just like a mini website. First things first: keep your free entry up to date, add a decent cover photo (preferably of people not just the building) and think about adding a few pages to highlight particular ministries: additional functionality is being added all the time. There can now be multiple editors, and the default administrator will be the incumbent (ACNY gets this info via Crockfords). To get started: find your church’s page and click ‘Edit this Church’ (bottom left).

Building/Replacing a website

Anything more than ACNY isn’t free: you will need to pay each year for at least hosting and probably the domain name (e.g. www.exampleparish.org.uk) too.

Build-it-yourself website tools (£50-100 annual for no-adverts) :
- WordPress.com
- Wix.com
- Squarespace.com
- Blogger.com (not just for blogs: includes templates which work well for static pages)
Pay a website builder (£100-500/annual): lots of web firms available. Two worth checking out are Church Connect (which is based on Squarespace hosting), and Nettl (based on WordPress, just like this website). All such providers these days will include a high quality theme that is responsive to mobile, tablet and desktop screens with a consistent layout. Accessibility and SEO tools are built in. The WordPress and Squarespace systems make it easy for one or multiple people to add and edit website content with ease. The websites come with security certificates to provide you with the essential little padlock (https, not just http). A website with Nettl will cost around £500 to setup. Church Connent is around £500 for them to set you up, with a £10 monthly hosting fee.

Appearing on web searches

SEO: To improve the chances of Google (and other search engines) ranking your pages more highly in their results, the structure and accessibility of your website is vital. For SEO-specific advice, there is good clear guidance at: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
Google Cards: This is the box in the right hand corner that appears when someone searches for your church in Google. Churches will need to create a Google My Business listing (or get access to one, if it already exists). Visit the Google support page here for help with how to do this. Not claiming this card also leaves churches vulnerable to someone else doing it and providing incorrect information.

Review your current site:

Links and branding: We link to every Parish site where possible; please link to the Diocesan website too. If you need to update logos, please see our branding page;
Responsive: Since 2008, all sites should be ‘responsive’, resizing content to work well on smartphones and tablet devices. Sites which aren’t responsive will exclude 30-50% of potential traffic. Website templates which come with content management systems like WordPress or Joomla or Wix will all be responsive out of the box;
Bottlenecking: Sites which require a single person to make updates via HTML / FTP are prohibitive as methods of communication and can suffer when people move on or aren’t available. A free CMS with multiple maintenance logins (like WordPress, Squarespace or Joomla) would mean many people would be able to update content at any time, reducing workloads and easing communication. For example, every single member of the diocesan staff have their own login for this diocesan website and can edit content as they see fit;
Accessibility: Sites built with accessibility in mind will not only be better for users but will naturally perform better on search engines. Great free tool to audit your website here: https://wave.webaim.org, which includes advice on how to solve any issues your site may have;
Ergonomics: Navigation and ‘grid’ (layout) should be consistent between pages. Changes in emphasis, layout, navigation and branding can disorient the user;
Fonts: A minor point perhaps, but the only real rule we’d highlight is to ban Comic Sans. The issue with Comic Sans as a font >> https://www.comicsanscriminal.com – being unaware of the chequered history of the font can be a problem for credibility. There are great free fonts out there eg. https://fonts.google.com/;
Images: Ideally use at least one quality image on each page. These include pictures of people, not just buildings or objects, but check you have permission from anyone depicted. There are free image banks if you don’t have pictures of your own yet, including LightStock; and the free diocesan images on Facebook.
Architecture: A more advanced point perhaps, but websites that allow you to ‘tag’ your article/page content are more connected and future proof. Tagging is a fundamental to data architecture because it removes the hierarchical limitation of information, and enables sites to connect information laterally through topics. Read more about this

Our own diocesan website is built using the free WordPress.org engine, and is very friendly for those users who update the site and add/edit content, for all levels of expertise.