Guidelines for Church Websites

Introduction

Getting Started

Why Set Up a Church Website?

Who Should Run Your Church Web Site?

A Basic Website

An Advanced Website

Other Sources of Advice

FAQs

This page tries to give some guidelines and helpful advice to Churches thinking about having a website. It is based on my experience of running a number of websites since the middle of 1996 and so contains a lot of illustrative links to my own websites. Please forgive me for that - they are the sites whose philosophy I understand best and which I know should still be there as you access this web page!

The online world is still developing and changing rapidly. In 2011 about 73% of UK houeholds had broadband Internet access. A website can serve your existing membership, attract in new members, and change attitudes towards your Church in the surrounding community. The lack of a website says something as well!

This web page was originally developed in 1999 to support a chapter on "Websites et Al" in a book by Rev Richard Littledale published (March 1999) by the Baptist Union on communication techniques for Churches. The book is called "getting the Message across ... the art of communicating effectively".

But if you find it helpful and you want some more specific advice on setting up a Church website you can send an e-mail to me at cphicks@btinternet.com.

Colin Hicks Webmaster for: Teddington Baptist Church Churches Together in Teddington The Teddington Society Wiki Stepping on Out

Building a simple site can be quite easy. Most people start with one or two basic pages of information about their Church and then build it up as they learn how to do more. You don't have to produce an all-singing and all-dancing site at the outset! I am happy to provide advice (by e-mail), but please read this page first - the answer to your question may be here. In addition, as I am asked further questions which seem likely to be of general interest, I add the answers to the FAQ section.

Getting Online: If you are reading this, you are presumably already online! However, you may not have realised that most Internet Service Providers offer website facilities free to subscribers as part of the e-mail and Internet access service. Some Internet Service Providers also provide for free the basic software needed to create a web page. Consequently if you are already connected, you can get started very cheaply especially as being connected means you have already all the essential hardware (and possibly the software too). You can get web space of several megabytes (these days even as much as 50 megabytes) bundled (as a "free" offer) with your Internet access subscription costing 15 pounds a month or less for unlimited broadband access (with "reasonable" use conditions).

There are many companies who now offer reasonably priced webhosting and domain registration (especially for .org.uk and .co.uk domains). Your Internet Service Provider or the company which hosts your website will usually help you register a suitable domain name for a fee!

When I began writing websites in 1996, I used CompuServe which gave 5 megabytes (at September 2004) bundled "free" for the basic CompuServe subscription of 6-50 pounds a month (Phone bills extra, connect time of more than 5 hours a month charged 1-50 pounds an hour extra.) You could switch to a flat rate payment plan if you uses more time than the average user and that is what I eventually did. Until September 2004, I used CompuServe for most of my websites.

The LBA website and my church website (Teddington Baptist Church) are now both on space provided by a company associated with Godsweb called Christian Hosts. For a long time I kept CompuServe for my personal webspace and to redirect users from the old websites to the new ones. But when CompuServe became an email only service in 2009, I switched to using BTInternet for my personal webspace.

Online Time: Maintaining a website requires time browsing the Internet. Apart from anything else, you may want to surf the net to find good graphics and ideas to update your site or provide links. That takes extra time and money. I began with modem services paid for by the minute but flat rate broadband connection packages are now the normal way to connect to the Internet.

Hardware: Most churches first came onto the web using facilities provided free by a member who (like me) was already into computing in a big way. To do it from scratch was expensive if you had to buy all the hardware and software (at least 700 pounds). When I began, I was already on CompuServe and had all the basic software from them. I also had Word 6 and CorelDraw 5 for other purposes. I already had a suitable though aging machine.

If you are starting from scratch today, be aware that you don't need the latest hardware although you will need at least a Windows XP PC (or Mac equivalent) with an Internet connection. You can also probably mostly manage with freeware if you look around for suitable software. Web development software like Dreamweaver is nice to have but quite expensive.

Before wasting a lot of time (and possibly money), you need to decide why you are setting up your Church's website - for example whether you want to convey only basic information about the Church or to present more of a feel for the Church. Do you want to present your Church as a spiritual and activity resource centre or as a community of people sharing a particular set of beliefs. In deciding this, think about your likely target audience and how to influence them. But do not fall into the trap of presenting your Church as something it is not. It is helpful to describe your typical visitor, in the same way that you would when designing a seeker-service or other outreach event.

Some good basic reasons for setting up a Church website might be as follows (some sites can hit one or more of these targets):

(1) To provide your members with information
The London Baptist Association (LBA) website, for example, is aimed at its own members. It concentrates on providing them with useful information about the LBA. It also signposts them to each other (e-mail addresses, Church websites) and to relevant Christian material on the web.

However, the site inevitably has visitors who stumble on it who may be non-Christians and others who will be Baptists or Christians from outside the LBA. The site recognises that and has a little bit of evangelistic material in case a person stumbles on it who is enquiring about how to become a Christian etc. It also attracts a lot of enquiries from Christians in the USA who are simply browsing the web, sometimes planning to move to or pass through London. It therefore has some additional material aimed at them but that is not allowed to divert the site from its main purpose.

(2) To attract people living in or moving to the area to your Church
At Teddington Baptist Church, we thought our target audience would be the mobile person looking for a Church and either already living in or moving to the neighbourhood. They were likely to have some church background without necessarily being a Christian but interested in seeing what our Church had to offer. We decided to try and convey the Church as a group of interesting people motivated by a belief in Jesus Christ. We set out quite deliberately to dispel the external myth that Christians (and especially Baptists) are boring people who are out of touch with the real world.

We therefore designed the content and presentation of material on our main website to be attractive to the interested outsider. The attractively presented material on the site does contain direct evangelism e.g. Meet Some TBC People as well as the softer evangelism of the Virtual Baptist Church Tour, Views on the News, Leonardo's Notebook (a scientist's jottings on faith), and Our Multimedia History.

(3) To present the Gospel directly to the non-Christian (direct evangelism)
A Church site could be designed at the top level (entry point) for direct evangelism with details of times of service etc at a lower level. Such a site might, for example, try to attract in visitors by using headlines and keywords on currently controversial topics. Then it could turn a initial discusion of them into a Christian challenge.

I do not know how effective that appproach might be for a complete site. People attracted in under false pretences will resent you wasting their time, so always provide full value on the advertised topic as well as any evangelistic spin or side message. My closest try at this has been with a single site feature on the Teddington Baptist Church site - Bugged by the Millennium? which we have took offline during 2001. During the year 2000, this offered a choice of links to information on:

• Action 2000 - the Millennium Bug
• Jubilee 2000 - world debt relief
• Greenwich 2000 - celebration details
• Y-2000 - Jesus Christ the reason for the Millennium

(4) To provide a point of contact with the community (soft evangelism)
At Teddington Baptist Church, we set up a second site in 1997 which was aimed at a completely different audience - the complete outsider living in the area with no contact or interest in Christian things at all. This site was called "Wot? - What's Online for Teddington?". It was an Internet information site for the local community.

The only connection with the Church apparent to the casual visitor was that it was sponsored by the Church - and so had advertising banners for the Church's activities like any other sponsored site on the Internet. It stepped right over into the community by carrying information on all local societies, websites etc. Even places to find real ale. We had a clearly stated editorial policy on the website but we have deliberately adopted a non-exclusive stance.

Wot? took a lot of work but generated a lot of community interest and recognition for the Church and at its peak it had over 100 visitors a day. However, after being online for about 15 years, its role largely been taken over by efficient search engines like Google. The number of daily visits dropped to a few dozen a day and we closed it down in 2014.

(5) Other Reasons for Setting up a Church Website
Some might argue that having a website shows that the Church is up-to-date and modern. Just being there is enough. That may be true when someone first comes onto the web - and it is enough reason to have a basic website which takes very little time to set up and maintain.

I believe there are more powerful reasons than that, although they are more to do with future than present impact. The Internet is a new medium for communicating the Gospel. We can only discover how to exploit it by being there. I was inspired to set up Wot? by the wide vision and inspiration on what Church websites can be used for in Patrick Dixon's book called Cyberchurch: Christianity and the Internet (published by Kingsway ISBN 0-85476-711-8; RRP 6-99 pounds). This book gave a lot of good ideas on how Churches can develop their use of web sites - visionary stuff!

Existing Church websites can provide you with good ideas for how to identify and reach your target audience.

Creating a Website: Begin by looking at what others have done. There are many LBA Churches already on the Web. Have a look at their websites. A list is on the LBA website. You need to decide what you are going to do before starting to develop your website using any software.

Developing a Style: I always start by developing a style for a new website and setting it out in a "Style Sheet" so I get a reasonably consistent look for all pages on the site. This includes things like how to navigate around the site. Look at what others have done to get some ideas. I hope you have noticed a consistency of style on each my websites. For example, on any of my websites every page has the same top and bottom and may have a similar layout. Again, on every website, each page has a standard way of getting back to the main menu page. For example:

• Teddington Baptist Church - click on any logo to get back to the home page; standard menu at the top and bottom of every page.

These features are deliberate and pre-planned, not an accident. You will find it much easier to develop your site by developing such a standard style and your visitors will find your site much easier to use.

Learning from Others' Code: You can probably learn a lot about how to do the things you see on other people's websites by looking at their HTML code. With most browsers you can do this by right clicking on a webp page and selceting "View source" or "View page source".

Copy Others!: It is polite to ask people before you copy their ideas, code, graphics etc. You should also respect copyright.

However, Churches are welcome to copy ideas, code, graphics or any other material from any of my websites in building their own websites. In fact everything on my websites which does not carry a copyright sign is either already in the public domain (and borrowed by me from someone else) or created by me and placed in the public domain. Take care because some items (e.g. music files) may have copyright statements within them.

Basic Editing Software: In the early days, to start creating a web page, you could use a program like HomePage Wizard (from CompuServe) which did not require you to know any HTML (the language used to write web pages; HTML = HyperText Markup Language). You can spend a lot of money on software (see advanced software) but start small rather than starting by spending money on the best software. These days you can get some very good free software (freeware) for editing websites including some like HTML-Kit 292 and Open Source software like Amaya. You can also get Open Source Content Management Systems like Joomla and Drupal.

Clip Art and Graphics: I don't like much of the free Christian clip art available on the Internet but by searching you can find some reasonable graphics.

There are also secular sites around like CoolText and Zygraphics which offer free services of generating custom graphics for you - sometimes as samples aimed an encouraging you to visit their site or buy their advanced services.

Template Services: Some companies offer hosting services which may include setting up church websites using a suitable template. These vary from free services which offer a single page on a standard template like Churches dot Net, Find a Church and Netministries to more sophisticated offerings like church123.com and Godsweb which, for a fee, offer flexible templates for church websites which they also host. The Baptist Times had a website builder scheme with church123.com which was specifically aimed at Baptist Churches wanting their own website.

Advanced Software: I describe below the cost of becoming more sophisticated but don't think you have to spend all the money listed below. I have invested over the years since 1996 as I have built up my understanding. For the first few months of web page design, I used the free software provided by Compuserve, then I started wanting to do things not possible without better facilities. Also I am an experienced computer programmer (since 1966), so have tended to get fairly deeply into coding JavaScript etc. That is not strictly necessary!

If you are more ambitious for your website than can easily be achieved using free software from your Internet service provider, it can cost several hundred pounds to equip yourself with suitable software and information.

Editing Software: I started by using WebEdit (which was at the time a shareware program) to write my HTML code and manage the website files. WebEdit 2.0 Standard Edition cost 40 dollars to register. I later upgraded to WedEdit Pro 3.1 costing a further 40 dollars. Shortly after I had bought it, the future of WebEdit became uncertain for quite a time because Ken Nesbitt (who wrote it) sold the rights to a company (Luckman) which went out of business in December 1998. However, it was acquired by sandiego.com which promised to keep it updated. In February 2000 it was selling the Standard Edition for 80 dollars and the Professional Edition for 130 dollars. Sadly that company now seems to have gone out of business and WebEdit no longer seems to be available.

There are, however, many other commercial programs available. The more capable ones like Adobe Dreamweaver can cost 100s of pounds but they can do much of the work for you and allow you to work at a "What You See Is What Yu Get" level or at raw code.. It is not strictly necessary to buy programs like Dreamweaver - the experts claim to use only Notepad and File Manager. Indeed, I would advise against buying this kind of software unless you intend to do serious work on developing and maintaining websites. It is sufficient to use the Open Source and freeware programs mentoned above to learn how to develop websites. Once you have experience you can deide whether to buy something like Dreamweaver.

Because I am an experienced programmer and like to work in HTML I still use WebEdit Pro 3.1 but I have also used a similar but more advanced (yet free!) program called HTML-Kit 292. I also use the Firefox browser with the Webdeveloper extension to check that the code I have developed is standards compliant.

HTML and JavaScript: To produce something like the Teddington Baptist Church website, you need to write (or copy and adapt) quite sophisticated HTML code, write (or copy and adapt) JavaScript, and generate appropriate Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - I have done all of that. This can all be done using Notepad or a simple free HTML editor but is easier with more advanced software.

In 1998 I bouht a good book on HTML which cost me 47 pounds (Using HTML from Que) and a similar good book on Javascript (Using Javascript also from Que) which cost me another 47 pounds (both including CDROMs). I found these invaluable to provide systematic explanations of the subject matter. Today I would probably get by with searching the Internetfor tutorials but at the time I was using a 56k modem!. I still refer to them today - and have added other similar reference books which have also been good, if hefty, investments.

For very sophisticated sites, you have to find out how to use the latest versions of HTML, JavaScript code, and Java Applets either by studying books, other people's code, or by downloading the latest manual from the Internet. With a good web page authoring program you might not have to learn much HTML but it helps. On the web you can find lots of help: a good advice site for basic HTML is at The Bare Bones Guide to HTML.

I have surfed extensively and downloaded material from a wide range of specialist HTML and JavaScript sites (all free except for connect time). Two excellent JavaScript sites The Javascript Source and JavaGoodies.

Java Applets can be used to generate quite stunning visual and other effects. They can also be found on free sites - see the list at TheFreeSite.com or can be purchased at reasonable prices from sites like AnfyJava.

DHTML: I avoided using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) until late 1999 because it had not been well standardised in its implementation - that is there were big differences between the Internet Explorer and Netscape versions at versions 4/5 of their browsers. If you used it, you needed to identify the browser a visitor is using and send them to a page tailored for their browser. This is now less of a problem but you still need to be aware of when different browsers might render your code differently.

Creating Graphics: Then, you may also need good graphics software. When I started, to my existing CorelDraw 5 (now selling for less than 100 pounds), I had to adda shareware program called Gif Construction Set from Mindworkshop to create animated graphics (costing about 30 dollars to register). I also used MapEdit (25 dollars to register) to create the active maps (the graphics and/or maps on which you click to go somewhere).

It is worth putting a lot of effort into getting the graphics on your website as small as possible - designing them to look good on the screen, but still to download quickly as possible.

Music: I also bought some music software (Mozart) which I would not otherwise have bought to compose music (Mozart is shareware costing 30 pounds to register). This was usd in the early years to create midi files which produced high quality music very flexibly from very small files. But sadly modern browsers seem to have abandoned midi and use mp3 or similar formats for music. For about 30 pounds I bought Switch from NCH Software to convert between audio formats.

Video: To create the online videos of baptisms I used video capture software and then generated the different formats using online video conversion services. I also use Prism which I bought from NCH Software for about 30 pounds

Music Copyright: If you use music still within copyright (within seventy years of the composer's death) you ought to have permission from the composer and/or an online licence. There is now a music licencing scheme for websites (see PRS for Music). Their cheapest licence is 118 pounds per annum which is expensive for a non-commercial website just wanting to use a short musical snippet. That is why I use out of copyright hymn tunes like Amazing Grace or tunes written by people willing to grant a free licence.

Visitor Counter: There are several ways of counting visitors. The simplest is if your internet service provider offers a facility. If not, there are now a number of commercial services offering free Visitor Counters including tracking the use of your web pages. A list is at Visitor's Counters. I used to use a free visitor counter hosted on a university site but that has now been withdrawn so I have set up a visitor counter using the facilities offered by my service provider.

Visitor Book or Guestbook: There are now a number of websites which offer free Guestbook services. I used to use the Phaistos Guestbook on the London Baptist Association and Teddington Baptist Church websites but now no longer to offer a Guestbook on those sites.

There are also secular websites which provide advice on how to build websites to make them easy for visitors to use. TheFreeSite.com lists various free services available for webmasters including Visitor Counters and Guestbooks.

As webmaster of several Christian websites, I get asked a lot of questions about setting up websites and my experience. Here are some of the questions and the answers I have given.

Colin Hicks

What sort of response have you had from people visiting your Church website?
A very positive one both from Christians and non-Christians. We have had a few people (very few) arrive at the Church having found out about us solely from the website. We get a lot of encouraging e-mails from Christians and non-Christians.

We sometimes get e-mails asking for information. They range from simple enquiries about running a Church website (e.g. what kind of response do you get), to people who want to know about Baptists (e.g. do your members have to be teetotal?), to family history enquiries (e.g. is a named person buried in your graveyard), to rather surprising questions (e.g. I am an American Baptist - do you use the same Bible that we do?). I try to give a positive answer to every enquiry as quickly as possibly with a light and respectful touch remembering that there may be language or cultural difficulties in my understanding the question or their understanding my answer. This can require great diplomacy. I always try to reassure the non-Christian enquirer that we will not take offence at any question they ask because "we do not take ourselves seriously although we do take our faith and our Lord very seriously".

What content have you found has been of most value to those people visiting your Church website?
Obviously you need to have the core information (times of service, address, map, perhaps details of any youth groups). Beyond that we have had an excellent response to a number of our site features, especially to the Virtual Baptist Church Tour. A number of schools and school children all around the country have used our site to get information about the Baptist denomination and we have found the style of that feature attractive to a wide range of age groups.

Our Great Christians web feature has also interested many as it presents aspects of the life of some individual Christians which have inspired some of our own members.

We have some direct evangelistic features on the site into which we try to gather people by softer routes - like Views on the News, Meet some TBC People, Virtual Baptist Church Tour, and Watch a Baptism!.

Are the majority of those visiting your Church website Christians or non-Christians?
We don't know for sure! We know nothing about any visitor unless they choose to tell us by completing the Visitor's Book or sending an e-mail. We get a lot of messages and enquiries from Christians (like yours).

I suspect that for the main Teddington Baptist Church site most visitors are Christians. With its associated sites it has about 100 visitors a day (July 2015).

How often so you update your Church website?
My main websites are updated at least once a week. Sometimes twice. The core material remains unchanged but there are always minor changes to upcoming events. The monthly features (Views on the News) need to be changed. In the early years, I developed and added a major new feature like Our Multimedia history about once every four months but it is now more like once a year.

What about protecting kids (and others) from bad Internet content?
If you come across any illegal content while browsing the Internet, then report it through the Internet Watch Foundation or by telephone to 01223 236077 and official action will be taken.

A UK based service organised by Christians, SurfontheSafeside.com, offers a subscription service to block access to offensive sites for £3 a month (November 2003).

Work proceeds on the PICS classification system used to self-rate sites. The PICS system is explained on the W3 PICS page. The system is not yet fully standardised but two of many ratings sites are ICRA and Safesurf. META tags rating this site and/or page as "entirely safe for kids" are at the top of this page's HTML. These were produced by those two ratings systems.

Content Control is already built into most new browsers. They use the ICRA system as standard. Rating systems passed on PICS will be built into other new browsers as they emerge.

To set the Content Control for

• IE3 (Win 95) you use the successive menus: View, Options, Security and then click on Enable Ratings
• IE4 you use the successive menus: View, Internet Options, Content, and then click on Enable in the Content Advisor box
• IE5, IE6, IE7 and IE8 you use the successive menus: Tools, Internet Options, Content, and then click on Enable in the Content Advisor box

Those working with children and young people also need to take care not to expose them to risk.

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