Two months ago Pastor Rick asked our youth Bible study class if we would make a web site for the church. He said that he would like for new residents to be able to find our church on the Internet when they moved in. Pastor Rick felt that a nice looking website with our address and some directions from major highways would be great for drawing new faces to church. He did want us to try and keep the cost of making and maintaining the site to a minimum as our funds our limited to church donations.
I figured that with my experience I’d be able to make something useful for the church. I first looked into getting a free site for us to use. I figured there is nothing less expensive than free. I let the Pastor know that we could get a decent free site to use and he gave me the green light.
The first type of free web site I looked into was a WordPress blog. I figured that these are easy and simple to set up so it wouldn’t take much time. After giving it some more thought I decided that we should look into something a little more fancy. WordPress is great for quickly getting messages out, but I wanted to draw people into the church so that they could feel as great as I do each Sunday.
I decided I needed something with more of a “wow factor”. A flash web site would be the best way to get this. With a flash site I would be able to make a neat introduction and even add some flash animations to really make the site appealing. When a new resident sees the great web site they might just end up deciding to visit our church. Conversely a poorly made web site might keep people from wanting to visit so I knew I had to do a good job.
I went on the Internet looking for a free flash web site before I did anything else. After looking around for awhile I came to a site that had what I was looking for. I found this through an article I read about a student creating a free flash site for his school project. This person had found the ultimate free site that let you use all kinds of flash applications. The free site even came with a multitude of templates to choose from. Many animations were provided and everything was really easy to set up.
We used a local Minneapolis seo company to optimize the website for more free search engine traffic. This company did a great job optimizing the site and building links to it. They really made things easy for us.
Well two months later we got a new family to come to our church. The pastor asked them how they heard of the church and they said they found it on the Internet.