You can customize your church website template as often as you like by downloading any of Sharefaith’s hundreds of church website banners, featuring a variety of themes, colors, designs, and seasonal motifs.
What is a homepage website banner? Your homepage banner is the most prominent aspect of your homepage. It’s also the first thing that users will see when they visit your site. Use this space to advertise a welcome message, new sermons, upcoming events, special announcements, conferences or anything else you may want to promote. Your website banner can link to any place, whether on your site or on an external site.
Why use a homepage website banner? If your church follows the liturgical calendar, then you can find matching website banners and themes for every major event in the liturgy. You can also create custom content with a website banner. Simply download a banner, open it in your favorite photo editor, input your own text, and upload it to your site. If you are skilled as a designer, then you can also create your own custom banners.
Note: The following tutorial has been modified to instruct how to upload home page banners with any templates that are running the Sharefaith theme v. 1.1.3 or newer. Your website should update on its own. If it is not, please refer to this tutorial.
How to replace your church website banner by downloading Sharefaith’s predesigned web banner graphic:
- Go to Sharefaith.com and click on the Church Websites link in the top menu.
- On the far left under Church Websites, click on WEBSITE BANNERS.
- Browse and select the website banner/banners you would like to use.
- A new window will open, featuring a larger image of the banner.
- Download the banners by clicking on the JPG button under Download Options on the far right.
- Save the banner to your desktop or any other location on your computer.
- Open your newly-downloaded banner into your favorite photo editing software. For this tutorial, we will be using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and the blue cross banner from Sharefaith.com.
- Add your own text on top of the banner. Make sure you choose a contrasting color that will stand out from your banner background. Refrain from using script fonts. For professional-style typography stick with simple, standard fonts like Arial, AvantGarde, Helvetica Nue, etc.
- After you are done, save your banner as a JPEG. Don’t decrease the visual quality of the banner by lowering the quality or file size. The banner has already been optimized for your church website.
Adding your new banner to your church website:
- Log in to your Church Website Control Panel.
- In your left sidebar navigation menu, under APPEARANCE, click on SF THEME OPTIONS.
- Find the section called “CHANGE YOUR HOMEPAGE BANNERS BELOW.”
- Click on the BROWSE button to search for your banner image file on your computer.
Choose your newly-created banner from your desktop or other location on your computer, and click OPEN.
- Click the UPLOAD BANNER button next to the BROWSE button
- Your banner will now be uploaded to your website.
- Repeat the above steps for every new banner you create and upload.
- Preview your website to make sure that it looks right before you save your changes.
- Click the SAVE ALL CHANGES button at the bottom of your SF Theme Option page.
Extra Tips:
- If you want to rearrange the banners to display them in a certain order, you can drag and drop them to do so. The banner that is placed at the top will be the first banner that is displayed when people visit your website and the rest will follow in the order that you put them in from there.
And then it will look like:
- If you want your banner to serve as a link that people can click on to go to a certain page on your website or even to another website altogether, you can copy the URL address of the page you want to link to and paste it in the IMAGE LINK text box next to the banner image.
