Step by step guide to setting up a church website

What you will need:

Somewhere to put the website

The Internet is just a great big network of lots of computers (known as servers). For anyone to see your website it needs to be on one of these servers.

This is usually known as hosting. There is some free hosting around but for a professional finish you should purchase some hosting. There are many places you can buy cheap hosting from. However bear in mind that it is usually true that in hosting you get what you pay for. If you want super reliable hosting with loads of good features then be prepared to pay a little more.

If you use free web space please bear in mind that you may have to display advertising as part of the deal and you will have no control over who advertises. Online gambling is one of the most advertised kind of site at the moment.

When you sign up you will get some ftp information. You will need this for loading your pages into your web space.

A domain name

Domain names can be bought so cheaply that there really is no need to use the free address that came with your free web space. A domain name will also allow you to use professional looking email addresses etc. Most domain selling companies offer a way of diverting your name to free space if you really must take that route but try to find the extra for some paid for web space.

Software

Something to edit web pages. There are some free tools around if you can't afford anything (see our tools page). Please don't use illegal software.

Image Editing Software. Again there is free stuff around but even a powerful bit of sofware does not need to be expensive (see the tools page).

Competant Person

The best person is of course a web designer but failing that go for someone who understands computers well. Try to get them to be honest about their design abilities. Few people can design well and this site will be a point of contact for people with your church. If its very ugly and hard to use it will put people off.

You need someone who knows how to install and set up software and who can use a word processor. It is little more complicated than this.

Graphics

There are templates around that you can use. We offer a set of free templates but whatever you use try to make sure it is attractive and simple. Complex designs with lots going on may look nice at first but they tend to be hard to use and so put viewers off.

Use a professional designer if you can. They should be able to set you up with a design that you can subsequently edit.

Images need to be optimised for the internet. You will need some software to do this with. Every image on a page slows down how fast the page loads. If you use a digital camera the pictures will be far too large for the Internet. Search on Google for advice on this one there are plenty of sites that will tell you what to do.

Content

Get people to write you content before you put it all together. Give them a deadline and be as specific as you can. e.g. I need 200 words on your group by October 15th. If you say I need a few words for the website sometime you are likely to never get them. Be prepared to negotiate on dates etc however. Remind people of their deadline one week before its due.

The steps

Step 1. On your own computer create a folder to hold the web site (call it something like "churchwebsite". Create a sub-folder with the name "images" (no quotes of course). This folder will hold all your images. When you create anything for the Internet don't use spaces in the names. Some hosting servers get confused by these spaces. Use - or _ to seperate words if you feel you must, bear in mind though that when a link is underlined you won't see any _.

Step 2. Create the pages in the folder. At first I like to build all the pages because it makes it easier to build the navigation system. You can always overwrite the other pages with the design as it grows. The main page will need to be called something like index.htm or default.htm (index is the more usual and its what the server will display when someone goes to your domain name). You will often see pages with .html at the end and this is the original way of doing things but with old dos (does anyone remember dos?) limitations you could only have three characters after the dot hence .htm. Sometimes you see other endings like .php or .cfm etc. If you need to know what these mean look them up but they are not necessary for a normal html web site.

Step 3. Build the design of the page and put in the graphics. Some graphic programs help with this stage by slicing up an image you have created for the design and producing an html page with the design in it. This saves a lot of effort but it will nearly always need some tweaking and you need to really know what you are doing.

If you are using templates then this is the stage to load them into the website. Just copy them across if you are using ours - I can't tell you how to use anyone elses but presumably they will give you instructions for this.

Step 4. Put in the content. It's better to have a page with a simple paragraph than a page that says "under construction" or similar. I've found sites that said they have been under contruction for the last three years - doesn't look good for a visitor.

Step 5. Tidy Up and Spellcheck. This is the time to go through each page and just check that things are working. Check the links and spell check everything.

Step 6. Upload the pages to the website. How you do this depends on your software. You need something with ftp capabilities. Some web software already has this built in or there are free ones around (or paid ones of course) or their is always Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Firefox which both have htp capability but may require a little fiddling around to get to work. Most compentant IT people can make this work.

Step 7. Check the site works.

I hope you find this helpful.

Chris

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