Building An Online Ministry From Idea To Traffic.

Entering into the world of the internet from a publishers perspective can really be an overwhelming experience, especially if your new to the concept and you really don’t know where to actually start.

This article is aimed at helping you get an idea of some of the major steps involved when setting up your online ministry, This is not an all encompassing tutorial that covers every single aspect of building your ministry online, but more of a broad and general overview of the processes involved along the way.

But, before we begin trying to explain the overall process of building your website I would like you to try to Imagine that building a website is similar in the concept of building a real life bricks and mortar building.

It’s common knowledge, that before any structure can be erected there are certain steps that must take place before you can enjoy the benefits of your brand new dwelling.

Building your website is very similar,

In the concept of building your site, you will have to spend time on planning, choosing what services you will need to employ, how you will want your site to look, how are you going to get people to come to your site and then encourage them to stick around.

So with that said Lets Begin.

1. Defining The Purpose and The Objective Of Your Site.

Defining the objective for your website is an important step that you shouldn’t underestimate or gloss over, this step will help you to establish a solid foundation for you to build your online ministry on.

Some ideas that come to mind that may help you in deciding on the main objective for your site could be…

How would you describe the best possible outcome for your website?
Who do you actually want to be visiting your website? are you trying to attract non Christians, young Christians or mature Christians?
What is the main message you would like your site to convey?
Is your site intended specifically for disusing and debating doctrine?
Do you want to use your site as a means of ministering to your church?
What is the specific age group you are trying to reach?
Do you want your site to be used more for outreaching and showing your local community how your church is getting involved and supporting local events and charities?

Whatever your main purpose and vision for your site is, try and define it clearly and accurately so it describes your overall vision and purpose.

Getting The Ideas Out Of Your Head.

A step I find really helpful is to brainstorm and write out every possible idea for my website. I find, this exercise helps me to clear my thinking, and because I have written down my ideas, I don’t loose any of the Ah Ha’s that randomly pop into my head.

There really is no great secret or special method for this step, I simply get a pen and paper, or whiteboard and continue to brainstorm as many ideas that come into my head until I simply run out of new ones.

Organizing And Mapping Out Your Ideas.

After you have your ideas down on paper, It’s time to put them in an organized and structured format.

What we are trying to accomplish here, will determine the categories for our website. When deciding on categories, it’s important to remember there are two types of categories you will have on your site.

Top level categories
Sub categories.

I recommend you try to limit the number of top level categories to no more than six. The reason I suggest this, is it will keep your site looking tidy and well organized.

Once you have decided on the six main categories for your website, start placing each one of your ideas into one of the six Top level categories, these will eventually be your sub categories.

Your Sub categories will be where you place your individual posts, I never place posts directly in a top level category.

Choosing Your Domain Name.

When you are deciding on the domain name for your website, your are basically summing up your site in a single word.

That’s why choosing a domain name which is in alignment with your vision and purpose is paramount.

I recently wrote a post titled Choosing The Right Domain Name For Your Church Website, which goes into much greater detail on choosing a domain name, But just to add some quick pointers, you could consider choosing a domain name that is…

Keyword Optimized and Specific.
The name of your current ministry or church.
Specific to your local area.
Or
Specific to your targeted audience, ie; age gender, nationality etc…

Once you are happy in your domain name decision, you will now have to choose a domain name registrar to purchase your domain name from, Currently I am using Godaddy.com

Important; Make sure you check the history of your desired domain name. You can do that by using the Wayback Machine.

Choosing A Suitable Web Host.

Web Hosting can, and does play a major role in the success of your online endeavors, but with web hosting being one of the most competitive industries on the net you can get some absolute bargains when deciding on your webhost.

Some factors for you to consider when deciding on which web host you will use could be…

Price, you may be suprised how ridiculously cheap a good web host can be, how does $2.00 a month sound?
Support, I suggest and recomend you only choose a webhost who will provide you with 24/7 support. You never know when you will need to contact your web host.
Software, Does your web host supply you with any software to help you build your website, or track and measure the traffic to your site.
The control panel, I personally like to use cpanel I find it very easy to use and navigate my way around.
How much storage and bandwidth is available?
and…
How many Domain names and databases can you have on your web hosting account?

Currently this site is hosted with Webhostingpad.com which costs me around $3.00 a month.

You can pick up some web hosting plans for as little as $2.00 a month, and although a plan like this will probably need to be upgraded at some stage in the future, depending on the size of your site and the traffic you are getting, you can certainly sign up for a plan like this and save yourself a heap of money when your getting started.

You may even find that you will never have to upgrade your plan, and you will also be able to set up multiple sites with these accounts, so each one of your pastors can have their very own blog if they choose to.

Once you have your domain name and hosting sorted you will then need to decide on your site software.

The Building Blocks For Your Website.

There are tons of ways you can build a website these days, for example, You can set up your sites the old fashion way of creating a .html website and upload your web pages manually.

I don’t recommend you do this unless you are building a small static website and the content will almost never be changed, or you could use a CMS (Content Management System) for hosting your web content.

There are a few popular options available, the ones that I know of are Wordpress Drupal and Joomla,

I have only ever used Wordpress so I can’t give you any advice, opinion or help with the other website platforms.

The reason I decided to use Wordpress is because I heard very early on in my online education that Wordpress was the leader in blogging platforms, and, it has probably the biggest online community that supports the software.

Everything I will teach you about setting up your websites ( well for now at least) will be about Wordpress.

Wordpress is free to use, and the amount of free themes and plugins available online will simply astound you. so if your interested in following me on this site I recommend you use Wordpress.

How Will Your Site Look?

Start getting an idea of what you want your site to look like, what functions do you want your site to have, how easy will your site be to navigate around.

What color scheme do you want for your site? start surfing the web and bookmark any sites that you particuarly like the look of.

Always keep in mind your end user and remember, you want to make it as easy as possible for your information to be found.

Have a look at your favorite websites for ideas you can use when deciding on how you want your own site to look and function.

Some things to take notice of are, the sidebar positions and the location of the navigation tools, ask yourself, what are the functions that you find particuarly useful when visiting a website?

As I said before, there are literally countless themes for Wordpress freely available online. You can find plenty of great looking themes for free, or if you prefer you can buy a Premium theme, you could even have your own theme created specifically for your needs.

I suggest you use a free theme to start with, until you become familiar with your website and the different functions that are available, changing themes can be as simple as a couple of mouse clicks, but this can also be a time consuming exercise, depending on how much customization you do to your themes code.

Im sure you will find a free theme that will be suitable for your churches website.

Just a quick note when choosing your theme, in most cases you can easily change the images in the header, so if you find a theme that has everything you want, but you don’t like the header image, you may still be able to use it after you have made a couple of simple changes.

Wordpress Plugins.

Plugins are another important consideration when building your site, I won’t go into too much about plugins here, but I will mention that plugins help to extend the functionality of your Wordpress site, basically a plugin is a piece of software or code that plugs into your existing website.( more about plugins later)

Pages, Categories, Posts and Tags.

Deciding on your pages, categories, posts and tags will bring us back to one of our initial tasks of organizing and mapping out our ideas, When building your site with Wordpress you have the option of choosing either a page or a post, firstly let me clarify what the difference is between a page and a post,

Basically a page is used for content you do not intend on updating, for example I use pages for legal pages, privacy, terms, contact, ect…where a post is used for content that would be regularly added to your site and is relevant to the specific category topic you are writing about.

You can also organize your content with the use of tags, these are great if you have content that may suite more that one category, I like to keep my articles category specific, but I may use a couple of tags to describe what my article is about.

I only recommend using a couple of tags, at the most three per post, as you can be seen as keyword stuffing your content if you go overboard with tags and it does make finding specific content easier if your using specific tags for each post.

Building A Database For Your Online Ministry

Depending on what you want to use your website for, you may want to build a database of people you can contact on a regular basis.

Lets say for example you want to build a blog about Christian based business, and you are looking to send out a bi weekly or monthly newsletter with tips, scriptures that you find could relate to a kingdom based business or specific products that you may have, you could try sending out your emails using your regular email client, but what happens when your database begins to grow into the thousands of subscribers?

You can do this manually by adding contacts to your email address book and build your list this way, or you can automate the process and use what is known as an auto responder.

You can use an auto responder to send out bulk emails without the fear of being labeled as spam, or send emails on a sequential time period based on the settings you set up.

I use Aweber.com for my preferred Auto responder.

And finally To Wrap It Up…

Social Interaction And Creating Relationships.

With sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter becoming increasingly popular it is important that you consider taking advantage of these mediums as a way of getting known and generating traffic back to your website.

A great use of these sites is for posting and responding to prayer requests and testimonies, For instance, just the other day I saw a prayer request go out on Facebook and within a few minutes there were at least five people responding to the post. It’s also useful for building a sense of fellowship, you can really create a feeling of community with the use of these sites.

If you want to build an online ministry you must start using these sites. No question about it.

So there you have it, The entire process from idea to traffic in a fully laid out plan for you to use to start building your site.

Hopefully I have explained this in a way that you can begin mapping out your own website, in a logical and well structured manor for you to easily follow along. If there is anything you feel I may have missed or something I haven’t explained clearly please leave a comment.

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