Why Good Communication is Necessary
October 16, 2008 by Bill Robbins
As some of you know, my family and I are helping to plant a new church in Birmingham, AL. We were preparing for a publicity blitz this coming Sunday afternoon and as part of that I had some door hangers printed up. I used a company that greatly emphasizes their 48 hour turn around time so that I could have the hangers by Friday afternoon with only 2 day air shipping. I placed the order on their website, uploaded the pdf’s with no trouble and went on my merry way. The site is well designed and functional so ordering was no problem.
Well the hangers did not ship on Wednesday as their 48 hour guarantee told me they would. So I opened a support ticket for some help. I promptly received a call saying they were closed on Monday and that delayed printing a day. As a result I would need to pay an additional $57 to receive the hangers on time.
The problem is no where on their front page, or any of their order pages did the site say they were closed on Monday, the day I ordered the door hangers. I went through their site and the only place it mentions it is on their contact page. In effect they won’t tell you when they are closed until you have a problem with something.
This brings up the importance of anticipation and good communication. We all need to anticipate what kind of information visitors to our websites will need and provide it to them in an upfront and clear way. Churches should provide clear links for people to find directions, service times and ideally at least a page dedicated to helping them understand what to expect when they come to your church.
My 48 Hour experience reiterates the need to think through our communication plan clearly from the point of view of a guest. Otherwise they may have a regrettable experience at your church that could have been prevented with a bit more forethought.
Write me a comment below with some good examples of church website communication and any bad ones you can think of.
Plugins to Help Your Church Website
October 10, 2008 by Bill Robbins
While WordPress is a great platform to run your website, it doesn’t have all of the features you probably want in a modern church website. It’s nice to know you can expand the functionality with some of the 3,000 or so plugins that wordpress.org offers. The question is which ones can help you out of all of those.
To make your website the best it can I’ve put together a list of the most useful WordPress plugins for churches. I’m certain that there are many others that could make the list, but these make a great starting place.
Podcasting: We have been using the PodPress plugin for some time and have been generally pleased with it. What you want to provide in Podcasting is a way for people to subscribe to your messages in iTunes, but still be able to download them individually without using iTunes. PodPress does this well, plus it lets people listen to the message inside of the post without saving it to their computer. You can download PodPress here as well as learn more about it.
Contact Form: There are numerous contact forms for WordPress available out there. I like cformsII quite a bit for several reasons. It allows you to have multiple forms which is especially handy if you need several sign ups for events or contacts or some other purpose. Plus it comes with several built in styles that can be adapted to fit the feel of your website. It allows you to specify what information you collect and whether responses are required or not. You can put initial information into the form that gets cleared out when someone clicks on it. It is very professional in appearance. You can download here.
Content Gallery: Most churches have lots of information that they are trying to communicate. Add to that the relatively small space that makes up the front of any church website and you have a disaster waiting to happen. A great way to get around this is with some sort of content rotator. Lots of these are available for use with Flash. Flash looks great, but it tends to be slow and is often inaccessible. If someone views your site on an iPhone, the content stored in Flash might as well not be there. Content Gallery is a slick plugin for WordPress that uses a technology called javascript to create an image rotator that links to specific posts on your site. It’s easy to set up and the effect is great. I use it on the front of www.organizedthemes.com to highlight themes and services we offer. Some of my clients use it to showcase upcoming messages as well as large church-wide announcements. You can learn more about Content Gallery and download it here.
Newsletters: Many churches like to send out regular newsletters to keep their congregations up to date with what is happening at the church. There is a fantastic plugin called MailPress that allows you to use WordPress to run your email campaigns. This is a full featured plugin that allows you to send emails to all users, or just a select number of them. It also allows you to style the email to look like your website to keep your style consistent. We’ll go into more depth soon about what the ins and outs of a good email campaign. You can learn more about MailPress and download it here.
Calendar: What church doesn’t have some calendar of upcoming events? Even if it’s just the weekly services, something is planned just about all the time. One of the best ways a church website can help out a congregation is through the use of an online calendar. WordPress does have a variety of plugins that can help you in this regard, most of them do have their limitations. Right now we are setting people up with WPListCal by Jonathan Kern. You can find out more about the plugin and download it here. This plugin will allow you to keep an online calendar of upcoming events. It doesn’t set recurring events, so it’s better suited special or one time meetings than weekly gatherings. One thing this plugin does well is produce a list of upcoming events that you can easily feature on your homepage or in your sidebar.
WordPress is a fantastic tool to manage your website’s content. I hope that with these plugins it will be even more useful to your church or ministry than it is now. Part of its great flexibility is its ability to adapt and stretch through the use of great plugins and themes. Here at www.organizedthemes.com we are committed to helping you make the best use of all these tools.
To make sure you stay on top of all the developments in WordPress and the web that affect your church’s website, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed here.