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Building a Congregational Web Site
An Introduction to the Process of Establishing a Web Presence for Your Congregation
 When considering whether your congregation should have a web site, the first thing to decide is the purpose of the site. Deciding up front, on the focus and mission of the web site will help you to produce a more informative and well-designed web site than if you simply throw a bunch of information on a web page. You need to decide on the purpose of the site and the audience. Is the site mainly for non-Christians? Prospective members? Existing members? All of the above? You may even want to come up with a mission statement for your congregational web site. This way you will have a constant reminder of your site's purpose and a guide for deciding whether future content is suitable for the web site. To get some ideas on the type of information you might want to include on your site, see our list of possible web site categories and content.
Once your congregation has decided to go ahead and produce a web site and decided on the purpose of that site, there are two main areas that need to be addressed before your site will become a reality. First, you need to find a place to host your web pages. Second, you need to find someone to produce and maintain the content.
Hosting the SiteThere are a variety of options when it comes to hosting your web site. The most inexpensive way to host a web site is to use one of the free web site hosting services that are available on the web. There is a list of a few of these sites provided in the list of resources. These services provide a small amount of disk space to individuals or organizations that are looking for a place to host a web site. The reason that the majority of these sites are able to provide space for free is that they make their money through advertising. Generally, if your web site is hosted through one of the free web space providers, there will be advertisements either within your page, or within a separate advertisement window that pops up whenever your page is loaded. One downfall to using one of these services is the long, often complicated web address (URL) that people will need to use in order to access your site. Also, the amount of disk space provided may not be enough for those who are seeking to provide large amounts of information on their web site. Service and support are other issues to keep in mind with one of these free services; there may not be easy access to someone who can help with questions or problems that may arise. Often times the use of scripting or other more advanced techniques is not permitted on these sites either. There are a number of limitations to using a free web space provider. However, for congregations who have extremely limited resources, or for those who are not quite sold on the importance of a web site and are looking for a way to test it out with a minimal investment, these services provide a viable option.
The other main option for web hosting is to use a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP). These companies are in the business of hosting web sites and providing access to the Internet for a fee. There are a vast number of both national and local ISP's from which one can choose. Generally, an account with one of these companies will include access to the web and the rest of the Internet, one or more email accounts, and a certain amount of server space for hosting a web site. The fee for such services usually runs about $20 per month. If there will be a need to access your account from different parts of the country, then a national ISP is a good choice, since they usually have local phone numbers in most major cities from which one can dial into one's account. However, if there is no need for this, then a local ISP might be the better route to take. It is often the case that one will get better service and more personal support from a local service provider. Most people who have access to the Internet already have disk space for web hosting allotted to them through their provider--they just may not know it.
A third option that may be available to some is free hosting through some other organization. If your congregation is associated with a local university or similar organization you might have access to web server space through that organization. Likewise, if someone in your congregation works for a company that provides web space for employees, this individual may be willing to use some of this space for the congregational web site. In any case, it definitely pays to check for any connections that someone in the congregation may have prior to paying for an account with an ISP.
Producing the Web SiteOnce you have found a place to host your web site, you need to find someone to create and maintain it. It is very important to identify a contact person in the congregation who will take the lead and be responsible for the web site. This person does not necessarily have to be the one who actually produces the content (though it helps), but someone needs to take control of what information gets put up on the site. This helps to insure that information remains current, and that the information on the site is not objectionable or inappropriate. Once this person has been identified, you can find someone to produce the pages. Many congregations these days have members who have created web pages. It might be a good idea to put a notice in the bulletin asking for volunteers. Don't forget to ask your youth group. Most kids these days are quite attuned to the web, and many of them have their own web sites. This is a great opportunity to get youth more involved in the church. If there is no one within the congregation who is willing or able to produce your web content, then you can either hire a consultant (which can get expensive), or learn to do it yourself. Believe it or not, creating a web page is not that difficult. There are many tools out there these days (some of which are listed on the resource page) which make this task very simple.
If you decide that you are going to learn how to create the web site yourself, you first need to learn a little bit about HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language), which is the language of the web. There are dozens of books available from any decent book store that will teach you the basics of HTML. There also a number of web sites that offer HTML tutorials. The beauty of HTML is that it is a mark-up language and not a programming language. This means that to create a web page, all you are doing is taking a regular text document and inserting specific "tags" into the document. These tags cause the text of the document to be aligned and displayed in certain ways. Once you have learned what some of the simple tags are and how they work, it is easy to produce a simple web page. In fact, you can look at the source code for any web page on the Internet by selecting "View Source" from one of the menus in your web browsing software (such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer). This will allow you to see how others created their pages, you can then copy their code and implement it on your own page. There are software packages available to help you in the creation of your web page; these programs are usually referred to as HTML editors. Some of the software provides menus or buttons that include HTML tags; you can click on these tags to have them inserted into your document. There are also programs available that do not require the user to know or even view the HTML source code. These programs, often referred to as WYSIWYG (pronounced "wizzy-wig", which stands for "What You See Is What You Get") editors, work just like desktop publishing or word processing software. With this type of software, one can drag and drop text and images, and use the mouse to control the appearance and alignment of the page. There a number of HTML editors listed on the resource page, some are available for free, but most must be purchased. Of course an HTML editor is not necessary for producing a web page; any text editor such as Notepad, Wordpad, or Simpletext can be used to create a web page. By typing in the desired text, typing in the HTML tags, and then saving the document with a ".htm" or ".html" extension, one can easily produce a web page with any of the text editors. Also, many recent versions of the major word processing programs allow one to convert one's word-processed document to an HTML file. These utilities do not always produce the most elegant looking web pages, but they are better than nothing.
Once your web site has been created, your ISP can provide you with software and information about how to upload your site to the web. After this has happened, your site is online and ready to be viewed. The only task left at this point is to publicize the site with all of the major web indexes and search engines so that people can find your site. If you notify the LCMS about your site (there is a form on the LCMS web site which allows you to do this), we will provide a link to it as well. The only thing left is to continue to update and improve the site.
Lutheran/LCMS Graphics--Download the LCMS logo cross, Luther's rose and the synodical seal.
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