So, you’re now involved in managing the church website. That’s awesome. You should know that there are a few things that you need to avoid as the church website manager. We’ve compiled the top-ten list of things NOT to do in managing the church website. I think you’re going to find that this is really helpful.
10 Things to Avoid in Managing Your Church Website
- Hoarding the password. You may be the church website manager, but you don’t need to guard the password like you would protect the key to Fort Knox. Instead, you may generously assign lesser levels of responsibility to people who can contribute to the church website. (Learn how to assign multiple editors to your church website.)
- Changing the theme frequently. It’s easy to change your church website theme with Sharefaith church websites. The downside of this is it makes you want to try out all of the extremely cool templates, and changing it frequently. Not a good idea. How would you like it if you tried to visit Google.com, and it looked different from what you were used to? (Oh, wait. That happens pretty frequently.) You know what we mean, though. Don’t constantly change the theme. It messes with people’s minds.
- Installing tons of plugins. Since Sharefaith church websites are built on WordPress platforms, you can install plugins—little mini programs for your church website and add special features or abilities. We encourage the use of good plugins, but be careful. Some disreputable plugins could crash your site, slow down your site, or generally cause problems that are hard to fix. Choose plugins that accomplish a useful task and have very high rankings from lots of people.
- Deleting someone else’s stuff. So maybe you’re on this power kick as the church website manager, and you decide to delete the youth pastor’s blog. Not a good idea.
- Adding everything to the home page. The home page is the first page that someone sees when they visit your church website. Some church websites load all their information on this one page, thinking that somehow a visitor will read it all, absorb it all, and be changed forever. Actually, the more you put on a home page, the less people will look at it, and the more likely people will be to leave your site. Put pictures of the church picnic and an explanation of your Tribulation viewpoint on a subpage. Not the home page.
- Canceling your hosting to save money. True, hosting costs money. In the case of Sharefaith’s partnership with Truepath, it costs $7.99/mo (USD). That’s pretty cheap. If you need to save money, find something else to cut from the budget. If you cancel your hosting, you lose your website. And your domain. And all that work. And your church’s best source of information. And your church’s advertising. And a whole lot more. You would be better off taking a $95.88 cut in your annual salary instead.
- Changing the coding on the template.Unless you’re a whiz-bang-know-a-ton-web-programming nerd, we suggest that you don’t tamper with the source code for your website. No offense, but you’re liable to mess something up. If you have a question about what this means
div.column { padding-right: 10px; margin-right: 0px; }just ask us.
- Creating too many menu links. One really nice thing about Sharefaith church websites is that you can add as many pages as you want. What you should NOT do, however, is get carried away and add a ton of pages to the navigation menu on your church website. If you do, you’ll have a bunch of little drop down menus running off the side of your website and looking extremely tacky. Your church may have 892 really important programs, but you should put them in sub pages, not the navigation menu.
- Spending too much time on it. Websites are really fascinating, powerful, and useful. But they can also take too much time. If you’re a bivocational pastor, a busy deacon, or have more to do than just update the church website, guard your time. If you’re stumped on a question, see if we can handle it for you. We may not be able to create your custom church website (we sort of already did that), but we can help you if you have a problem. Hopefully, that will save you some time. Here’s how to contact us.
- Not managing it at all. Here it is. I’ve added the worst offense for last. The worst thing that you can do as the church website manager is nothing at all. A church website that is not updated is a church website that is functionally dead. I’ll spare you the rant, but you can read a very funny story about this awful tragedy.