Ideas for and from leaders, pastors, and creatives
Many pastors ask if their church can simply use PayPal for their online giving. The answer is yes! Paypal can be an effective tool, but let’s back up and first ask: what do you want to accomplish by providing electronic giving?
Electronic giving should be used as a tool to help develop generous people who can easily and effectively support the vision of the church. Here’s a checklist for evaluating an e-giving solution:
[This post is part of a series on Free and Simple Ways to Improve Your Church’s Website]
There are often a lot of small things you can tweak that can make a big difference for your website. In this post I’ll outline a few of those small details that you should be paying attention to.
Small Thing #1: Label Your Pictures
Most of the times visitors to your site will have no clue about the context of the photography on your website. There’s a good chance this is creating confusion for the user. Don’t take for granted that a visitor knows what your pastor looks like, can differentiate the youth service or building from adult service, or understands why there’s a whole bunch of people raising there hands. So if you’re going to feature a photograph that is outside a labeled gallery then give it a short and sweet label in one of the corners. This is also good marketing strategy for your events.
[This post is part of a series on Free and Simple Ways to Improve Your Church’s Website]
Your church is probably not thinking about launching a tv show, installing extra land lines, or how you can add a few more fax machines around the office. That’s because times change and technology evolves so fast. Obviously the same is true when it comes to your church’s website. If you’re revamping your site then now is a perfect time to start positioning your church for the future. Don’t worry about getting caught-up, rather feel free to jump ahead – much like developing countries who went straight to satellite tv or cell phones leapfrogging cable tv and land lines.
So where’s a good place to start when it comes to getting ahead the curve with your website? Consider the following insights from a recent Cisco report:
A surge in network-connected devices—and the number of Internet users—is helping fuel the rapid increase in Internet traffic, according to Webster. By 2015, there will be almost 15 billion network-connected devices—including smartphones, notebooks, tablets, appliances and other smart machines—and more than two connections for each person on Earth, the Cisco report said. There was about one per person on the planet in 2010.
The key driver in Internet traffic growth will be the use of video…
“There is a strong uptick in the use of video,” he said. “The network experience is much more visual in nature.”
Mobility also will play a role in the growth of traffic, the Cisco study indicated. Global mobile Internet data traffic in 2015 will be 26 times more than in 2010, jumping to 6.3 exabytes per month, or 75 exabytes per year.
[This post is part of a series on Free and Simple Ways to Improve Your Church’s Website]
“Don’t Make Me Think” is a book written by Steve Krug back in 2006 about a recommended approach to web usability. While this book is a century old in web years, it still contains valuable wisdom for improving your website. Krug’s plan is not to determine the “right way” to design websites, but to give you very useful guiding principles for your website.
