1. Upcoming events / news items, and
2. Personal blogs of church leaders

In this post, I want to expand on #2 and explain why I feel so strongly that church leaders should be blogging.

Double-edged benefits.

Blogging provides a win on two fronts. First, if you do a good job of blogging and a good job of educating your church on how to read your blogs (see more on that below), you can achieve extremely efficient and effective communication at a super low cost.

But even if nobody in your church ever reads your blogs, they still have enormous value. Their continual stream of content improves the viability of your website with search engines and presents your church to the internet as an active place.

This is why I say that blogging is by far the best place to focus your energy and resources if you are looking to improve your website. Blogging takes time. So forget about trying to add every little nifty gadget and gizmo that you think makes your website neat and pour your energy into providing a continual stream of quality content through blogging. This is where you have the most to gain.

Blogging is communicating.

Let’s set aside the trendy word “blogging” and just call it what it is. Blogging is communicating. Most every church leader from the beginning of time would likely agree that communicating is important. I think too many people get caught up in thinking that blogging is some kind of fancy internet fad or trend and that’s why they choose not to participate. But if we think about blogging as pure communication, I think its value becomes more clear.

Think about everything that you are trying to communicate with your church and even with those outside of the church. Put it all on your blog – thoughts on your vision and direction, new initiatives, events, announcements, philosophy, the reason why you made a certain decision … etc. Drill this down to each ministry level. If you’re a children’s minister, you need your own blog. At the very least, each primary church leader should be blogging about everything related to their church and their ministry.

How to get your church to read your blogs.

This one is easy. Just put information on the blog that they can’t find anywhere else. In every other form of communication you use, always direct them back to the blog for the full story. If you send an email, include only a small summary and give them a link to get the full information on your blog. In printed pieces, do the same thing. This is where having a blog CMS that supports friendly URLs is very helpful.

Then, teach your church how to subscribe to your blog. Nearly every major browser has RSS subscriptions built right in. Show them how to do it so that they’ll get your content automatically.

Integrate your blogs into your primary website.

The absolute best scenario for your ministry blogs is to build them right into your primary website. That way, your website benefits from all of the traffic and content added to the blogs.

To do this, you could build your entire website on a blogging platform like WordPress, or you could use a website CMS that supports integrated blogging. Cory Miller right here at ChurchCommunicationsPro is an expert on the former. For the latter, I’ll give another shameless plug for my company’s content management system, Sky. It has blogging built right in so you can easily add unlimited blogs to any page in your site (and it also has friendly URLs. Hooray!). There are others out there too. Just look for the ability to integrate blogs with your main site.

In conclusion.

Forget about the mystique and start blogging not because it’s trendy, but because it is communication. Share everything about your church through your blog and use other means of communication to point back to the blog. Educate your church members on how to use and subscribe to your blog. In short, make the blog the center of your church communication. It will benefit your church and also give you a better church website than all the flash animation in the world could provide.

Tim Wall is a former church communications director. He currently serves as the director of product marketing for Element Fusion, a web development company located in Oklahoma City. In addition to leading worship part-time, he also blogs at DailyGenesis.

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1. A good design
2. A continual stream of great content

Don’t let anyone, including yourself, tell you that you need more than this.

I know it’s so very tempting to think that your website needs an interactive campus map or that awesome flash thing you saw on that one church’s website. Believe me, when I served as a full-time minister of technology and communications, I spent my days trying to build all of these whistles and bells into our sites. In the end, I realized that we missed the mark. We spent tons of money and tons of time developing things that very few people used while ignoring the one thing that keeps people coming back — great content.

1. Get a good design.

Your website needs a good design, but this is a lot simpler than most people think. Just go find yourself a good designer and pay them to design a site for you. Yes, you have to pay them. Good things cost money, but it’s really not that much and it’s a one-time cost. This is the easy part. The hard part is the content.

2. Provide a continual stream of great content.

This is the hard part, but you have to do it. You have to have great content that is continually added to the site. There are a lot of different types of content you could include, but I think there are only two that you have to include:

1. Upcoming events / news items
2. Personal blogs of church leaders

Sounds easy, right? Then why are there so few church websites that do this well?

First, I think it’s because most churches spend their time trying to add in nifty little gadgets and features that nobody needs and few people use. Second, I think it’s because they don’t put their site on a content management system.

Why content management?

If content is the single most important feature of a website, then you have to be able to easily control that content. That’s what content management systems are for. Listen, you have to put your site on a CMS, and that CMS needs to support blogging. There’s no way around it. If you don’t, you will never update your content. It’s just that simple.

Here’s my disclosure.

I work for a company that makes content management systems. In fact, we make a content management system called Sky, which is specifically designed to help churches and ministries do exactly what I’m describing above. So, you may think I’m just saying all of this to get you to to buy our products. Well, I’d love for you to use our products, but that’s not the only reason I’m saying this. Whether your use ours or another CMS, please just use one. Your website will never be effective without it.

Here’s my conclusion.

If you get a good designer to design your site and you put their design onto a content management system, you will have everything you need for a great church website. Once that’s done, ignore everything else and start working on providing great content each and every day. If you do, you’ll create a website that will be effective for your church and your community.

Tim Wall is a former church communications director. He currently serves as the director of product marketing for Element Fusion, a web development company located in Oklahoma City. In addition to leading worship part-time, he also blogs at DailyGenesis.

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