Keeping Track of Visitors
November 18, 2008 by Bill Robbins
Once your website is up and running, you will no doubt be curious about how many people are visiting and what they are interested in and what they are not. So how do you find this out? As is often the case, there are several WordPress plugins out there that can help you learn all kinds of information about your visitors. We can all celebrate that all of these services are free. Let’s see what stats tools are out there for you to use.
1. WordPress.com Stats. This plugin is made by Automatic the company behind WordPress. It requires you to create a free account at WordPress.com and get an API key which you will find under your user profile. (This is the same key you use for Akismet comment spam if you use that service). Once you’ve downloaded the plugin here and installed it, it will begin collecting information on all visitors who are not logged in. That is a consideration if you plan on having people who are a part of your community sign into accounts on your site when they visit. You will not have a record of their visits, what they read, how long the stayed, or how many pages they saw during their visit.
The WordPress.com Stats plugin provides basic information about visitors to your site. It adds a small stats panel to your dashboard that looks like this.
Click Here to See a Larger Picture of the WordPress Stats Dashboard
It also adds a link to your admin called “Blog Stats” where you can get into more detail about visitors, search terms, trends and so forth.
2. Google Analytics. The amount of free services that Google offers is truly staggering. I use analytics on Organized Themes because I find the details it provides quite helpful. One of the interesting features is the mapping of your site’s visitors.
Click the Image to See a Larger Picture
You can see where your visitors are coming from, actually from anywhere on the planet. It breaks visits down by country and then into state and/or city. When I started this site, I never dreamed that churches beyond the US, much less beyond the English speaking world, would have an interest in my site and themes, but people have visited from over 50 countries. To be honest, that just blows me away.
I also use Google Adwords for advertising and analytics connects into my adwords dashboard providing me with even more information. It’s easy to see how many of my visitors are there because of an add that I placed versus finding this site by more traditional means. Google also provides suggestions on how to improve your site so that you get a better rank in search listings. Since Google is the king of search engines, we all want to take their advise on how to improve rankings in their system.
You can find out more about Google Analytics and how to install it here.
3. StatPress. This is a simple plugin that provides basic information about number of visitors, page views and more. What it offers is a glimpse of not only actual visitors, but search engine spiders and RSS feeds from your site. While I still recommend using Feedburner for your RSS feeds, you can get a quick indication of new subscribers and total number of subscribers.
Click Here to See a Large Picture
The information on spiders is useful because both analytics and WordPress Stats don’t provide it and it lets you know that search engines are checking the content on your site for updates. If they aren’t checking, then you probably aren’t going to be listed very highly. You can download StatPress here.
There are other options out there, but these three will get you started. I should note, that it will take some time for all of these systems to gather information, so don’t expect much in the way of useful information on day one. Give it a bit of time and watch as trends develop. Then you will be able to make more meaningful strategic decisions.
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.
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