Web Site

By John Cole

5. The Web site

In the early nineteen nineties, web sites were unheard-of. The development of this new medium of communication has happened at incredible speed. Now no church should be without its own web site.

Web sites are something of a combination between the church noticeboard and the magazine - and should include all the material from both.

Key factors:

	Keep it simple
	Make it cheerful
	Use plenty of colourful visual images - photographs (but make sure the files are compact. Any file bigger than about 200 kilobytes will take too long to download.)
	Keep pages short. Longer magazine articles may need to be broken up.
	Include links to other sites - and encourage other sites to carry links to yours. Not to be missed are your denominational web site, and sites organised by local authorities, local newspapers and by estate agents.
	Get professional help to ensure that your site is within reach of the main search engines so that people who don’t know your site address can still find you.
	Keep it up to date. There is a busy job for an enthusiastic ‘web master’!
	Include a prayer section - and possibly publish the text of sermons. A web site costs nothing once it has been set up, so material that cannot go in the magazine can find an outlet here.
	Have fun!

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