Update your site often

Seach engines will check your church's site on a regular basis. They will scan through it and index it so that it is searchable. One way to rise above the competition is to update your site as often as possible. If you have a welcome message change it once a week. Give a summary of the last sermon you preached etc. If your site changes it will rise above sites that don't.

However I've seen it many times churches jump in with two feat trying to do it all. Updating your website can quickly grow into a full time job. Keep it simple. A few changes every couple days. Nothing major. Nothing that will take more then a few minutes. Building an online campus takes time and consistency. Like everything else in ministry just keep at it. over the long haul you'll gradually start reaping the harvest. If you try to do to much you'll burn out. Instead of drawing people to christ with your fantastic up to date website it will be another of the hundreds of website tombstones etched in stone and left unchanged for years on end.

Another issue to address under updating your site is the “volunteer website developer”. Every ministry of the church ultimately falls on the senior pastor. Everyone else can wake up sick Sunday morning and no matter who they are they can roll over and go back to bed because they know ultimately the senior Pastor will take care of it. Unfortunately websites don't generally work that way. The senior pastor knows nothing about the church website. All the passwords and other relevant information are in someones head. When they get transferred or they get to busy at work the website just sits and turns to dust. The podcasts doesn't go out the bulletin doesn't get updated. Vistors get frustrated and stop visiting the site.

Treat your website just like you do missions or music. Put a team together that meets on a regular basis and decides what to do on the site. Don't leave it to the one unemplyed accountant that took a html class in Highschool. Make sure you have a staff member on the team or sit on it yourself. The team approach helps because then at least more then one person knows what is going on, However you generally still have 1 guru in the group and they end up running with the ball while everyone watches. Then when he gets hit the whole team goes down. Warning shameless plug ahead. This is exactly the reason we started ChurchHost.Info. ChurchHost.Info lets your website keep going even if your star player is out. You don't have to know how to update the site. Or how to do all the things. Just email us or call us and we'll do it for you. Whenever you recruit a new quarterback or your guru finally gets caught up at work they can take back over. That way your website never becomes a forgotten tombstone of a failed ministry.