The Church and New Media is a good site for you if you are starting out on producing (or updating) a parish website. The Resources page has some good "five things..." type articles.
For what it's worth, my own advice to people at the moment is to get a good domain name that people can spell correctly when they hear it on the phone. Mine is now "blackfencatholic dot org" When it included the word "rosary", a lot of people not familiar with the faith (and some who are) spelt it "rosemary" - I do get letters addressed to "Our Lady of the Rosemary" from time to time.
If you host the website with a US firm, not only will you save some pennies in present economic circumstances, you also get a top-level domain (.org rather than .org.uk) with less fuss and expense than from an English company.
Then get Wordpress installed and have the posts on the homepage so that your site is easily updated. Wordpress also makes it easy to update your static pages too. It can be worth spending a few pennies (actually not much more than that) on a professionally produced template which can save you a bit of time: most of them are quite customisable.
Above you can see the homepage of my own parish website for my parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Blackfen. Not difficult to do. (Feel free to fire away with your suggestions for improvement!)
2 comments:
Dear Father,
I found this link on the web and the effervescent Dom Bettinelli had a hand in the endeavor. The link has abundant information on tips for a first-rate Parish website. I liked it so much I placed it on my TLM Info page as a link (along with your marvelous MP3 file on the responses at Low Mass!). The website thing is somewhat long, but Dom's presentation is helpful. By the way, your Parish website is very well done and I commend you for it!
Happy Christmas!
D.v.
Our parish website was just revamped using WordPress. I'm told that it's easy to use, and the results are a huge improvement over our previous site.
Compare for yourselves:
old site (www.StTheresaSugarLand.org);
new site: (www.SugarLandCatholic.com).
The comment about an easy-to-remember domain name is prescient. With our old site, one was always giving the spelling to inquirers, as some wanted to spell out "saint," or weren't sure of the spelling of "Theresa." Our new domain name reduces confusion.
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