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The internet continues to grow and it seems like there are more people using it as a primary source of information every year. Some of these people are looking for a church home or for other information and services that churches provide. It is my belief that most churches can better minister to their communities and membership with a website than what they can without one.
While many people are aware of their church's need for a website and many people have a desire for their church to have a website, they may be uncertain about what needs to be done in order to make this possible. Some people have taken efforts to create a church website, but they have found that keeping the site up to date is a chore.
This book is intended for people who are at least considering developing a church website as well as for people who already have a church website and are looking for ways to improve it. It takes a step by step approach that I believe anyone who has the willingness to learn can follow all the way from having no knowledge of how to develop a website to having an attractive, usable and maintainable website that is available for all the world to see.
This book is not intended to be a definitive guide on how to develop websites. There are too many technologies available for that to be possible. Other books and websites cover these individual technologies. This book is intended to be much more practical. By focusing on the specific task of developing a church website, the book makes it possible to develop a functioning website without the need to spend a lot of time sorting through all of the information that is available and deciding which technologies apply and which don't.
Readers who wish to use a different technology and readers who already have a church website will still find useful information within this book. While the code will not function in quite the same way for different technologies, the basic concepts remain the same. The sections that describe how to design the website and many of the other aspects of church website development will still apply. The reader need only adjust his implementation to use the chosen technology.
Pastor's and other church leaders who may not be interested in the technical aspects will still find this book helpful to guide them to an understanding and an appreciation for the work that is required to develop a church website. If you are reading the book for that purpose and intend to let someone else do the technical work required, I suggest skipping Step 5, skimming through Step 6 and Step 7 and skipping Step 8 while you are reading. These steps are the most technical and will be of little use to the reader who is not sitting at a computer ready to type code.
Let the creative juices flow. While the code provided in this book is enough to create a functioning website, your website development effort will be a whole lot more fun and a whole lot more useful to you if you are creative with the visual design as well as the features you include. Once you learn how to develop a website like this book suggests, you will be able to build on the basic concept and add features that you find useful.
It is intended that the reader read this book while seated in front of a computer rather than while relaxing in an easy chair. I will say it here and I will say it again to make sure that you understand, even though the code has been provided on the website as a reference, the code should be hand typed and the graphics should be created by hand. When the book calls for the reader to use a sheet of paper to draw the design or to answer some question, the reader should put pencil to paper and do as it says. Work through the examples. Read the code line by line. If at first you don't understand what the code is doing, read it again. All of the code is built on things you already know or will know by the time you reach it, so look for what is new and go from there.
Once you understand the code in the book, it will help if you write your own version of the same thing and then build on it by creating new things using the same concepts. Learn it however you can, but whatever you do, don't move forward until you understand each section.
I hope you will find this book helpful. If you do, please email me at the following address:
I would also appreciate being told of any websites you create using the concepts in this book. Also, if you feel so inclined, a link from your website to one or more of mine would be very nice.
This is a chapter from the book Church Website Design: A Step By Step Approach.