Church Website Series: Getting Content

A website with nothing on it is pretty useless. It doesn’t inform of serve any function if it’s just a list of pages, so you’ll need to get some material on it. Depending on the size of your church, this can be a very different task but whatever the case, you should look into getting other people to help and assist you with creating content for the church site. Here are a few items you’ll want to consider as well as why it’s a good idea not to do it alone.

Why Get Help

If you are a mega church, this is obvious. You can’t possibly know every ministry well enough to write about it with clear information. Furthermore, there are probably some very passionate members of those teams who would love to help provide their insights into the ministry and their passion will come through. It’s a lot better to have real passion rather than try to fake it in your writing. Plus, if you are going to ask them questions then you might as well get them to produce a bit more for you anyway.

That doesn’t mean you won’t rework or reword what they write but if they produce the first draft, you’re saving yourself time and going to get higher output in the end.

Videos and Photos

One piece of content people often forget about are photos and videos. However, photos and videos are very powerful for providing a window into the activities of a team and in our increasingly visual web, using great photos can lead to a greater sense of belonging and a more powerful message.

Many people use free stock photo sites which are perfectly fine if you want an image for an abstract page like contact, prayer requests and so on. But if you are showing of your ministry then I really recommend you try to take and use real photos of your church. Low quality but authentic images will resonate more. Plus with smartphones, I’m sure most people in your church will have easy access to a camera.

Descriptions of Team, Events and Groups

It’s much easier to have someone involved with a group write about their own group. They will no more details than an outsider and will share their passion. However, it’s worth having it checked over by someone else as the team may assume common knowledge of something which actually isn’t common knowledge.

Regular Site Content

If you plan on having regular site content (such as uploading sermons, blog posts, events and so on) make sure you agree on who is going to take charge of this. Too often churches start with these grand ambitions for sites only to slowly wain interest with no one to follow people up and push the site forward. If the sound team are going to upload audio then make sure they know how, if you have some people writing regular content, get them on a schedule or with someone to be responsible for when things are published.

My Personal Experience

My church is multilingual so I had the extra challenge of having to get pages translated for our content. Luckily we had some pre-existing content that I could easily reuse but not all of it was reusable and as such I got help from a polish member of the church to translate items. However, we started to face some issues with newer sermons. There was no system in place for who was going to record and upload the sermons which lead to a gap in the sermons being recorded.

In the end we set up a system in line with the sound guys and I took charge of uploading the audio to the site.

What about you?

Have you faced any issues with getting content for your church site?

Chris Wilson

Senior Staff writer, holder of the keys to the newsletter and writer of app reviews

I'm a Copywriter and content marketer based in Krakow, Poland. I enjoy sketchnoting in my free time and have some free sketchnote courses if you want to start.