Advice For Churches On The Topic Of Websites, Blogging, and Social Media

I personally believe in God, but I do not regularly go to church. However, I gave myself the challenge this morning of giving some website advice to churches.

I don't have any clients that are churches, so I definitely to not have a full understanding of what a church needs. However, I will just walk through the topic of blogging on the website and talk about what I would guess a church might need and how I would approach the topic.

A church would probably like to have at least one weekly blog post, maybe about the topic of that week's sermon or maybe another topic for the week.

Most clients start by thinking that they will be hiring someone to both build and add content to a website. But this is usually not the case. Software developers do not like doing data entry and the church would have to write the content fully anyway. This is where my job switches from software to consulting fir the benefit of a client.

On a weekly call at least two employees of the church would be taught how to use the website administrative user interface to make blog posts. If an organization has multiple employees or volunteers it's best to teach at least two of them. If one of them leaves, the church could continue blogging without interruption.

Having the church enter their own content allows them to use their creative efforts to customize each blog post as much as they want. For instance they might add multiple images or a YouTube video in the time they have budgeted for the task.

Over time, I would talk to them about Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. I would ask if they wanted to increase their reach, and if they did, that the blog posts placed on the website should be promoted with social media.

I would even say that while website software is my personal focus, their focus is probably on using the website as only one of their many tools and that one of the most important parts of my job is to teach them how to use all of their internet related tools together to reach their goals. The website is an important tool, but for some purposes definitely not the most important.

Consulting is the most important part of my job with each client, and it always will be. I love software development but for clients, software is just one of their needs. So with clients I talk a lot less about building software, and a lot more about using software and the internet wisely and efficiently to accomplish their goals.

#Websites #Churches #Blogging #SocialMedia #Consulting #Facebook #Twitter #YouTube #SoftwareDevelopment