How to get your church online

How to get your church online

The Massachusetts Conference has an extensive tutorial called "Creating a Church Website" - we hope to create our own version soon, in the meantime this tutorial has a lot of valuable material. The tutorial contains information including getting started, determining your audience, basic content, beyond the basics, photos, navigation, hosting, software and more.

A very useful resource is the book "Reaching Out in a Networked World: Expressing Your Congregation's Heart and Soul" by Lynne M. Baab (The Alban Institute). Lynne has also written a handy guide to basic website design "Websites that Work", which you can view here or download as a .pdf here.

Webmasters across the UCC share tips, tricks and ideas in our forum.

If your church is opted in to the God is Still Speaking, program then you are eligible for a free web page.

Let's begin by pointing you towards a few free or less expensive web hosting services with relatively easy "WYSIWYG" ("What You See Is What You Get") editors. Here's a short list:

http://forministry.com
http://www.ourchurch.com
http://webmedley.com (from free for GISS optins to paid)
http://www.nexo.com/create_church_website
http://sites.google.com

myUCC Online Community
Want to add blogs, groups, photo galleries, videos and more? Register your church for myUCC! Join the nearly 5,000 member community of users.

UCC graphics for downloading.

Need help creating a privacy policy for your website? Try this link.

Looking for free web hosting? There is an extensive search engine for those services here.

Want to compare paid hosting services? findmyhosting.com

For web browsing the web team prefers Firefox.

Kickapps - Lets you create your own online community site (like myUCC) and integrate those elements with your existing site. The integration of your online community site with your own site is crucial to delivering a seamless, branded experience for your audience and community members. Create Widgets and embeddable applications using the KickApps App Studio, that feature your community's media and content (photos, blogs and videos) and contextually deploy the Widgets on your website alongside editorially produced content to drive traffic between your site and its community experiences.