By Tim Wall
A user-friendly, flexible website platform can streamline (and improve) your church’s online presence.
These days, an outstanding web presence is a top priority for pastors and business administrators. To members and visitors, it’s the church’s voice and face.
But, maintaining an effective church website isn’t always easy. Because most churches have non-technical staff and volunteers maintaining their websites, it’s imperative that these sites are easy to manage and update. A handful of functionalities speak to this:
Adaptation to mobile devices — Today, delivering a quality experience across any mobile device is becoming a must. By using a website platform with built-in capabilities for responsive design, websites can automatically adjust to mobile devices to drive engagement and create a good user experience.
Blogging — Give your church leaders a platform to extend their messages and insights, along with church achievements and current news. Having a web platform with a built-in blogging feature makes this easy, without the need to maintain a separate blog site.
Online donations — A website is a great platform for generating awareness about your church and the specific causes it supports. Using a platform that lets users to easily set up and accept online donations can extend fundraising efforts beyond the church’s walls.
Events calendar — Churches generally host a lot of events, and managing them can be time-consuming. A web platform with a built-in events calendar makes it easy to share those events anywhere on the site.
Form builder — A form builder has many uses, but event registration is particularly useful to churches. Look for a drag-and-drop online form-building feature that allows churches to offer and capture event registrations and securely accept payments.
Selling products — Many churches occasionally sell products — for example, sermon audio / video or fundraiser items. A website platform that includes shopping cart functionality lets churches easily post items for sale to generate additional revenue.
Church administrators and pastors have a lot on their plates. Much like running a business, it’s imperative that they have the right tools and technologies in place to streamline operations —including an easy-to-manage, user-friendly website. It can make all the difference in how many tasks are completed, and how well.
Tim Wall is a senior manager for LightCMS, a NetSuite company. Prior to joining the team, he served as a full-time technology / communications pastor at Sugar Creek Baptist Church in Houston, TX.
