Times have changed. Our contemporary society has come to expect every legitimate organization, business, non-profit, or ministry to have a well-designed website presence. When it comes to being found by your community, being available to your members, and providing information to both, you must be accessible on the web. In fact, most modern church plants are scrambling to get their site up before they even begin services. It’s almost as important as getting a meeting place arranged. Even established churches are revamping their websites to provide tools for members on-the-go. But as we become more and more dependent on smart phones and tablets to keep up with the crazy, rushed lifestyle we’ve developed, having a church website may not be enough to effectively connect with your church family. A website that fails to contain up-to-the-minute information often gets negle...
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We came across this blog-post on www.churchleaders.com about church websites recently and thought the thoughts recorded were worth sharing. The post references the same Lifeway Survey that we mentioned on our blog several months ago. While we don't use (or recommend) Wordpress or pre-designed/stock templates, we do think the 5 simple points made in this blog post are worth thinking about. As a branding company, we believe each client is inherently unique and we strive to design them a website with layout, functionality, and attractiveness that is exactly right for them and reflects their brand, or identity. So, we don't deal with templates and this actually goes hand in hand with the article's point number 1: Engaging Home Page. Having an engaging home page is essential. We as a culture have become content to skim through content and jump from website to website looki...
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An interesting article written by Pastor David Roach describes how church websites are being underutilized by congregations. The article cites a few reasons for this, including limited time to work on the website and limited volunteer capabilities. "There is nothing wrong with using a church website to simply give directions to the church or state the church's beliefs," McConnell added. "However, we must realize that more and more people expect to be able to interact online without having to drive or make a phone call to the church." The article goes on to state that amongst churches that have websites (and most do), “nearly half of churches with websites (42 percent) update them only once a month or less.” This is where YCP can help. YCP makes the process of updating your website easy with our software Backstage. Backstage now is able to offer capabilities to church ...
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We’re continuing with some powerful game-changing information for your ministry—the basics of branding. If you read the last article, you now understand how vitally important effective branding is. Hopefully, you’ve even taken some practical action—steps toward implementing the information. This second article takes the information farther with some practical steps for church branding. In my last post, we started by defining “branding” and we embarked on the journey of helping your ministry define its brand. We covered the first step already. Steps 2 and 3 are described in the remainder of this article. To reiterate, the three steps to branding your ministry are: Define who you are (a.k.a. your brand, described by 3-5 defining statements) Identify your contact-points Create pieces to use for each contact-point In the first article, I asked you to begin brainstorming o...
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