Christian blog about church website design

These last days I kept on thinking about what should I do to create a community here.

Theory on what to do to grow a site

From the point of view of how to make a site popular, theory is simple: make it useful, easy to use and send to others and in time it will grow. Well, that’s the theory, indeed. How about the practical side of this story? I started to analyze these last days MT site and ask myself what could I do to make it more useful and easy to use? How could I make it user driven instead of being run by me?

Make the site useful. Period.

I think that the first answer I could think of about making it useful is to have more web templates published for free and the only way I could do this is to have people submitting such free website templates to be published, because without support from people all around the internet, it is not easy to grow.

Get help

So, in my opinion, the first thing I should do it to make more designers submit their work. This way, the collection of free religious templates will grow and the site itself will become more and more useful. Right? This is what I think about as a first step then, I will operate some changes(actually enhancements) on how the site operates, so you, as a user of this site to find the templates easier. When there will be more templates, there will be more difficult to find them. So I am thinking about a rating system, selection by author, by downloads, etc. I will see…

I also have other ideas, I wish I only have the necessary time for this since changes require time and this is something I don’t have much on my hands lately!

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One of the most interesting things I have noticed lately is the fact that people consider WordPress a blogging platform only. Oh, what a great mistake! WordPress has an other hidden face, the face of a real CMS, able to power up static websites. I know because I build websites using WordPress as CMS.

It is not difficult at all, if you think about it! The only thing you should do is to create the pages you want and assign one as the index page, then edit a bit your WordPress theme and remove the area where categories or archive are displayed. It is that simple and it works fine.

WordPress is a powerful CMS and it can be customized to the point where you can not tell it is a WordPress engine behind it. Maybe only the fact that the URL have the WordPress format, without the file name and extension at the end of the URL, for the rest, you can not tell what is behind it.

This is a great feature, if you think about it, because it empowers you to develop websites fast and easy without spending time on developing the website engine and this is great when it comes to productivity, one of the things you should always consider when starting a business.

Think about it and next time when you want to start a website consider WordPress as a CMS and not as a blogging platform!

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I was thinking these last days, when I started to speak about religious tattoos, how would it be to provide templates for such works here. I think it would be interesting, just that I would need to document a bit about it. When I started to provide Christian web templates, I knew I am informed about this business since it is my main job. The same with Christian MySpace layouts, I knew about them quite a lot, but about religious tattoos, well, I don’t know that much.

So, in order to have the job done right, I would need to get informed. I don’t know if I will do it, but I surely consider it.

I think I will start discussing it with a few religious tattoo artists around, maybe they will want to start a collaboration of some sort, to upload such artworks on this site. In the end, what you need to have, I guess, are some pictures cleared of background, in a few colors that can be easily reproduced on skin.

I will think about it and if I will start to put here religious tattoos, you will be invited to contribute also!

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At one moment I have written here a post about religious tattoos. Now I come back on it again, because I found on the internet very interesting information. If you look on Google for religious tattoos you will see that there are plenty of sites providing art works and templates for them.

Seems that this market is quite good and there are enough people to make it work on the long run.

How about a list of websites providing religious tattoos?

Well, there are a lot of Christian websites oriented to this form of art. I would enumerate a few:

religioustattoos.net
I liked this site because it provides also good information about tattoos history, explain what tattoos mean in a religious meaning, etc. Overall, it is a site that offers a whole package, not only tattoos.

rankmytattoos.com
Even well ranked in G, it is not devoted to religious tattoos but more to the general market. It also provides a religious section, but nothing about history, biblical meaning, etc.

tattoojohnny.com
Exactly as the one above, even if it provides a good collection, it is not oriented to religion but to the general art.

I think that the first is the most important in my opinion because it offers you a reason for which you get a
tattoo and doesn’t let you with no clue about why you get inked. You need a strong motivation in order to have your skin inked and this site offers you enough motivation and information about religious tattoos.

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Did you ever ask yourself if social media will work for church websites? Religion is not necessarily a subject to create a buzz, unless something happens. But the question is can a Christian website be sustained and grown from social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, etc?

There are many sites promoted by social media sites, some work better, some don’t work so well, but everybody tries his luck with this new buzz.

The fact is that in most of the cases, users of these social media sites are not very religious, they are more tech savvy and in many cases won’t promote and vote religious sites. I asked to promote this site using Digg and SU and the fact is that when I posted a particular website template, it was OK, but not regular articles. Those didn’t work…

Use social media sites oriented on your particular niche. They work better.

There are such social sites based on religious niche and they only promote religious websites. This kind of niche sites work better, it is common knowledge and they should be used to promote religious websites, One of these sites is blogs4god.com. The only (big) disadvantage of this site is the fact that it doesn’t have too much of a traffic so it won’t send too much traffic to your site and this is the exact reason for which you would use social media sites.

Find religious categories on general purpose social media sites

An other trick would be to go to regular visited sites and look for religious categories, if they have it. In such case, even if you won’t receive a huge traffic overnight, you may still get a decent spike.

Promote your products from an other angle

This is kind of a trick, if you want. Instead of promoting your products on the regular religious way, find an other approach. Let’s say you design Christian MySpace layouts. Instead of promoting your MySpace layouts and backgrounds as being religious, you may submit them to design categories, for ex. Promote them as free MySapce layouts, without making them Christian, just regular, all purpose. This way you can send them to more general categories like design, images, graphic, etc.

These are only a few ideas that you may find useful. I am sure you can enhance this list and come up with new ideas on how to use social media sites to promote your Christian websites.

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I have seen people asking around what exactly do they need when it comes to picking the right hosting package for their Christian website. I don’t speak here about picking one hosting provider or an other (even if personally I use IXWebHosting (click to see for yourself) for a lot of my projects), but about why you should avoid hosting your site “for free”, or what is “the price of a free hosting”.

While there are a lot of hosting providers that will give you free hosting for your site, you should avoid hosting your website on such servers, for a multitude of reasons.

First of all, ask yourself why they would offer you for free something they make money from. The reason would be publicity. Free stuff means traffic, means people finding out about yourself and about your service. This would be good for business on the long run.

1) A “free” hosting package usually has annoying ads

That is true and you admit it yourself, isn’t it? In most of the cases, free hosting means you will get advertising on your account, advertising that will pay your hosting provider money. You will probably have pop-ups, pop-unders, floating ads, etc. This way you build traffic and your hosting provider gets advertising, so probably after a short while the hosting service will get from the advertising displayed on your site more than you would normally pay for monthly hosting.

2) Bad service

Even if they seek publicity, exposure and “the buzz”, nobody will assign the best server for free hosting, let’s face it! The best servers cost money and they need to bring money in, so they will host payed hosting, sites hosted for free being assigned to some slow servers, with less resources, that will make your site to load slowly, driving your visitors away. Also, this is due to the fact that they will host so many websites on that free server that the resources will be exhausted even faster. More websites on one server means less available space, less available bandwidth, less available speed. You don’t need this, I tell you!

3) Not enough scripting and database support

This is in case you get any. Period. Usually free hosting package means HTML only, no PHP or ASP support and about databases such as MySQL, we should not speak about from the start because you won’t get any! Maybe it does not mean much to you, if you are not familiar with website technology, but scripting support enables you to have some interesting and useful scripts integrated on your site from third party providers. Database support means shopping carts, statistics, users, etc. Wouldn’t you like to have a blog on your site? Well, if you use a free hosting, then you probably won’t get this.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t speak about dedicated blogging platforms such as Blogspot.com or Wordpress.org. No, I speak about regular free website hosting that is not dedicated to hosting free blogs.

4) Customer support? What is that?

Another feature you will probably need is customer support. When you pay for something, you require support from people providing that service, but when you get it for free with a license of type “as is” you won’t be able to ask for much isn’t it? I won’t say more, you get my point.

5) Lack of reliability

This is something that you will get a lot. You try to visit your site and you will not find it, because the server will be down. Your friends will call you asking you what happened to your site, did you stop it? Because they can not find it. You didn’t stop it but you can not find it either…

This is caused by the fact that on free hosting there are a lot of people hosting untrusted sites that will probably crash at some point. The probability is high since they are so many. When the server stops, it stops for all the sites hosted there, not just for the one that caused the crush. And this means the server will stop for you too…

6) You won’t get too many tools to help you in maintaining your site

Payed hosting usually provides a lot of useful tools like statistics, file managers, ftp managers, backups, etc. All these will not be available in most of the cases. They help. Actually the reason for which they don’t provide such services is the fact that the premium packages they offer probably offers such tools so you will get one more reason to get annoyed and upgrade to a payed hosting account. Don’t you think I am right?

7) Backups.Oh, yes!

You need backups! I know I need them quite often. Everytime I make a mistake I am able to go back to yesterday’s version of the site and find what I need. This way I never lose anything. Free hosting doesn’t provide such services in most of the cases.

Third party gadgets and services

One of my friends complained to me about not being able to install Adsense on his free website because the service provider does not allow him to do this. Of course! I advised him to upgrade and get a payed but cheap hosting package to solve this problem since advertising will probably bring him enough money to pay for the hosting.

9) Watch out! Free services can stop anytime!!

That’s the worse reason out of all of them! You work so much for your website so you probably won’t be too happy to find out that due to whatever reasons your site has been deleted without further notice. I know it happened to me once and the site was perfectly fine, just that the terms of service required me to log in every 3 months. Well, I didn’t know that and when I knew it was too late for my site.

10) No domain redirection

Usually, free hosting providers don’t allow you to redirect your domain there. So, instead of having the address YourSiteName.com you will be stuck with YourSiteName.YourFreeServerName.com for life, because this serves their goal: advertising, exposure, brand building. While with your own domain your visitors won’t know where you have your site hosted, while if you also maintain their domain in your address, everybody will know. It’s again, free publicity for them!

11) Emails under your own domain name

If you have your domain name, you can create emails under that domain name, if you can not park your domain there, you can not have emails under your domain name, it is that simple, see reason 10. For example if you have the address YourSiteName.com you can have the email YourName@YourSiteName.com. Isn’t that great? Well, not with free hosting. Considering point 10, this is usually not possible with free hosting…

While these reasons are true for most of the free hosting providers, they are not true for all of them, or at least not all the reasons at the same time for all the service providers. For example, you may find free hosting without advertising or with PHP support, or with domain parking, but they will never ever offer you the same services as with payed hosting because they have no reason to do so. Payed hosting brings money. Free hosting brings less money than the first category, it is that simple.

These are only 11 reasons for which you should avoid free website hosting and go for payed one. You can find cheap hosting without any problem so, in God’s name, please avoid free hosting. It doesn’t pay on long term!

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I have received a question about the website templates on my site here. Somebody was interested to know if the templates offer ASP or APSx support as well as database support. I think there was a little misunderstanding here, since what you see here on this site is a collection of beautifully designed religion templates, but still, templates, nothing more. There is no scripting included, as the FAQs state. Everything is just about the way a site looks. These are all Christian layouts, not site engines, not scripts that power up websites.

I wanted to say this here so nobody understand that the websites layouts that you see here are backed up by scripts at this point and complain they are not, after they buy them.

Of  course, being a website template, it is very easy for somebody knowing his job to implement a website using any server side scripting like PHP or ASP or ASPX, there is no problem here, and if you ask yourself if all our Christian web templates offer this support for such development, the answer is yes, all out web templates offer such support for development. But they don’t come with this at this moment!

You can ask a coder, a web design agency,  or anybody knowing his way around coding to build the site for you using server side scripting if you really think you will need it. Just speak to any web design agency and they will help you build a website out of it.

Did you know we also offer such services? See the templates customization button on the upper side of the site and see our offer!

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I was thinking these last few days about what makes a good church website. Is it the design? A good church website design makes a good site? Is it the information? Well, I think that the answer is participation. Implication, being involved makes a good website. A website template is not good if left alone. A good website is good when is continuously improved, when it is continuously updated and when the information is continuously changed so people feel it grows.

It is very interesting, in my experience as a website designer I have found myself in a situation where I didn’t know what to put in the index page of a website, because the site owners didn’t give me too much information. But, after a while, when there was a constant communication and interest to make the site grow, I had not enough space in the index page for all the information that I had because the site grew in time and the owners sent me more than enough information to put on the site. I love these sites that perform this way. They also perform better in terms of traffic, users, ROI and customer loyalty, because people understand that behind the site there is somebody caring and willing to invest work in it. This is the way every site should be, this is they way YOUR website should work. So, as a short question, do you invest time and work in your church website or you just let it stay there because your work was done and the site is online? Think about it!

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I have read somewhere that every thing that is watched, grows. I watch this website since day one and it continues to grow, with small traffic variations based on the moment of the year we are on. Some periods are better than others, it is that simple. In some moments, internet in general and Christian web templates are not the hottest thing of the moment, and this is inverse proportional with the temperature of the season. Right: summer time is bad for internet, usually people is outside, on the sun, at the seaside, taking a sunbath and caring less about internet or about Christian web design and unfortunately, sometimes, caring less about the church, which is never a good thing to do.

But after a period of time, the traffic comes back and people start again be interested in how to build a church site, because they return to the Holy Spirit and they become more and more interested in Christian related resources.

I keep on offering these free website templates on my website, people will know about the fact that they are here and they will come to download them anytime they like, they will find free church templates here at any hour.

I also hope to make it grow as a community, the very essence of the internet today, so the traffic grow even bigger. And you know what? I count on you to help me do this!

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Some time ago we decided to add a section to this website so we allow our users to upload their own Christian templates on our site so our users can download them for free. I can tell you we worked a bit to develop this section and we were proud to add this feature to our site. However, I can tell you that there was not a very successful thing to do and I don’t know why is that.

The initial intention was to allow people to add their own free website templates so we expand our collection fast, cause there is not that easy to maintain such a website on a small team.

The fact is that there are enough people registered on our site, as designers that showed their intention to participate, since they created an account, just that they don’t upload templates. The process is very simple, so I can not tell for the moment why this is happening, but I promise to find out and do in such a way that the collection expand.

I would love that this site expand and grow from a small team (2 people) operating it to a community based site where people contribute. I have at this moment a very interesting base of visitors and email subscribers so I ask myself how could I grow this site into a community?

Any ideas?

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