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Ideas for Your Web Page

How do you make your web site "stickier"?

Your desire is to help people "discover" and use your website. You offer your site as a service to proclaim Christ and Christ crucified and to offer information and resources of your church for others to grow as disciples, then disciple-makers, of our Living Lord. This is a daunting task when one considers that there are several BILLION web pages available through the internet.

How do you get web surfers and regulars to stay around, even to use your site on more than an occasional basis?

Here are some ideas.

1. Make sure that the information and resources you have on your homepage meets others' needs - not just your own. This may mean that a user doesn't need to first see a picture of your building nor a history of your church. What they are looking for depends upon many factors, (e.g. the time of year - seasonal graphics and/or pictures on your site?), current events (i.e. tsunami catastrophe).

2. Post resources and information that can be used on a day-to-day regular basis. Several are now using the GRR web page, especially the "Area Ministry" section as an online directory for finding email and physical addresses and phone numbers of churches. As more and more people adopt "always on" connections such as cable and dsl, this number will increase.

A note of caution: whereas churches are public places and choose to list publicly addresses and telephone numbers, members of our churches have much different needs. As a general rule, do not post personal addresses on your web page. NEVER post a name and address of a minor. (Write a Privacy Policy. See the GRR's for an example of this.)

Another type of resource that many do allow you to post is an e-mail directory. Again, get persons' explicit permission to do so. There are ways that you can make certain pages of your website secure in a way that only those with the correct user name and password can access it. Check with a professional webmaster for help with this.

3. Post video. If you have Windows XP or Mac OS, you have with it a video editing program that can capture video you have taken with your camera, edit it, and publish it into files that can be posted on the web. These are "webcasts" and they are more and more becoming required for any site that generates returning visitors/users. Just look at the news network sites (e.g. CNN, MSNBC) and even the newspaper sites. Webcasts help your site come alive.

4. Post material that can be used for several purposes. For instance, you might put up a Bible Study or other discipleship study. A person can do this online, print it out, or print it out and use it as curriculum for a small group study.

5. Make sure you have as many links to other materials as is appropriate. Remember, the language and blessing of the internet is HTML - Hyper(as in "hyperlink") text Markup Language. After posting a story or other material, go back through it and see if you could help the reader find more on the subject, or similar material, by making links to other sites - or to other places within your site. Yes, you should do this as a matter of course on the homepage - because you cannot put everything on that page; but, you should also make links to other documents within your site. For an example, read and study Dr. Stinnett's Current Thoughts articles. Be careful, when you begin you may be prone to "overlink" or "underlink."

6. Not all links need to be within the material you post. Some may be needed to be listed on a separate web page within your site that can be found through your menu and site map. Do not just list these related and or recommended links. Write a couple of sentences for each - one to describe, one to share the importance.

7. Add a blogor a Wiki. A Sunday School class could establish a blog that all members of that class could have access to for both reading and writing comments. (An economical way to do this is to visit www.google,com. Download and install the Google "toolbar." Then click on the Blog offering. Google will carry your blog on their site or you can establish it on your own server. To do this with Google no investment in additional software is required. Make sure that when you set up this blog (short for "web log") that you place links to the rest of your church's site on the blog and that you place on your homepage the link to your blog.

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