Tools to Make Your Church Website More Engaging

Before you even look at making your Church website engaging there are some basic steps that you need to put into place.
First you need to build your website. Starting at this point you immediately have to think about your visitors to the site. It has to be built so it does the following….

• It is search engine optimized so it will bring traffic to it. This means it has to be built so it will please the search engines.
• It has to be easy to navigate around. Visitors have got to be able to find any information they are looking for quickly and easily.
• It has to obtain valuable information that is going to portray your Church in a good and appealing way.
• It has to entice engagement by your visitors. This can be on multiple levels. It can be by them being able to leave feedback on your content. It also has to have an easy to use payment platform if you are hoping to encourage donations online.

You will find that you have several choices when it comes to initially building your site.

• You can opt to go for some of the free web building programs that are available online. The good factor about this is it doesn’t cost you any money to get a website up and running.
• Or you can learn how to use easy platforms like WordPress which gives you more flexibility in building out your website. This allows you to have more control and flexibility in your layout and content.
• Then you have the option of using professionals to design and develop your site for you. The good thing about this is you can have it customized without having to learn how to do so yourself.

Security is a must

You need to make sure that you have strong security measures built into your church web site to make sure it is protected against spamming and hacking. You need a strong secure payment platform so your visitors feel comfortable about putting personal payment information on your site.

Focusing on engagement

Now that you have these “must haves” in place for your website, you need to focus on engaging your visitors. There are lots of great tools that can help you with this.

Free Tools

Google likes to help nonprofit organizations which includes Churches as much as they can.

http://www.google.com/nonprofits/
Here you can find many exciting tools to assist you. They include gmail, calendars, and Google Ad grants. These are all powerful tools to help you scale up your donations as well as encourage visitors to take on a volunteer role in your church where needed.

https://www.dropbox.com/
Working with the administrative members of your church will be much easier when you can use a file management system that is secure yet easy to use. Dropbox will allow you to do this and it is easy to set up.

http://optincrusher.com/
This is a great plug in that allows you to encourage your visitors to opt in to your email list for your newsletter, for example. What is really good about it is the fact that it doesn’t become irritating as many pop ups do.

Not Free But Affordable

http://www.jarbyco.com/

This is a mobile app that you can customize to send out live mass text messages to your list and congregation. It allows you to present quizzes and polls to stimulate interaction.

When it comes to your donation payment platform, you need a solution that is secure and easy to use for your members.