Church Web Hosting Must be Reliable and Secure
Catherine Smith wrote an interesting article entitled, “Small Business Web Hosting Must be Reliable and Secure on a web hosting review site, and it got me to thinking about what is important for church web hosting.
1) Reliability is essential – Regardless of why you have a web property, you want it to be available to people when they find you. Nothing is more unprofessional than having a broken, or slow loading site.
2) Security is essential – The last thing you want is for some hacker group to break into your site and deface it with a message that would be offensive to your congregants or visitors. For that matter you don’t want someone breaking into your hosting site in order to store content that they make accessible to others, i.e., music, warez, or goodness forbid porn.
3) Affordability is essential – Let’s face it. Hosting has long been a commodity service. Most churches will not be hosting extremely complex sites, or serving their pages up to millions of people. (Although that would be awesome.)
I have had the privilege, and experience of using quite a number of hosting environments over the years. For churches and religious organizations, Bluehost would be one of the providers at the top of my list. They low hosting cost even includes your domain name.
Web Hosting $6.95 Per Month / Free Domain
In her article, Catherine wrote, “A good provider should be like a “one-stop-shop” that provides a solution to small business web hosting, email, ecommerce, domain name hosting and other related services.” I concur.
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Drummer Boy 2009
UPDATE: The nine performances saw a total attendance of 39,400. This event has become a fantastic outreach event for Grace Church.
If you live in the Greater St. Louis area, there is a “must-see” event coming up at Grace Church in Maryland Heights. Enjoy watching the video, and I hope to see you there.
Drummer Boy 2009 at Grace Church
Building the kingdom of Christ through Internet marketing
Building the kingdom of Christ through Internet marketing.
Who wants a free “conversion friendly” website? Would you like to have a targeted audience driven to that website? Would this help your church or ministry reach your community? If no, then let me know why not?
The Internet is one of the greatest communication mediums on the planet. It is where people “are”. Websites, email, forums, blogs, shopping sites, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, social bookmarking sites, these are the places where you will find people talking. They are communicating online, and they expect to find you there as well. What a wonderful way to show that what you are doing is relevant to their lives.
When you begin to see the value of utilizing the Internet to reach out to people, I would bet that you would be willing to put the effort into it, and even spend a few dollars to do it correctly.
You will find some resources on this site to get you “in the game”. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions. I would be glad to help.
Do you staff for church marketing?
Does your church or religious organization have a person on staff dedicated to marketing / outreach? Maybe you have a team of people who head up that function.
Are they pastoral level, layperson, or both?
I think it would be insightful to find out what others are doing, and whether they feel like they are being successful with their efforts.
What type of outreach / marketing are you engaged in? Print media, online presence, activity based outreach, or many other forms? Which seem to be working the best for your church or ministry?
Do you have a mission statement for your outreach efforts? What are your primary goals for outreach / marketing?
Where do people spend their time online?
Users spend 45% of their internet time on content sites.
They go to the net to search, but users spend the majority of their time on content sites. Does your church or religious organization invest in putting up the type of content that answers the questions that people have about you? If not, why not.
You can position yourself so that people find you, but make sure you give them what they need to make decisions after they find you.
Maven Approved
