Creating Websites
Here are sites I used for all our web related needs.
www.misk.com This is for our domain registration (then I forward everything from there to my host site). This also gives us several emails (using our domain name) which forwards email to whatver account I choose. Mine go to me, prayer email goes to our prayer team leaders, etc.
www.freewebs.com This hosts my site. If you fish around, you’ll find the “No banner ads” option for $10 per year. This has given us plenty of memory to store our files, etc, and we've not had enough traffic to shut it down. We average about 500-800 hits per month total. Very user friendly to edit from anywhere online.
Use a blog. Some churches/groups use a free blog to create a site. I just don't know how to edit mine quickly enough, plus we already have everything uploaded at Freewebs.
Promote your site: Speaking of hits, load up the meta words and description boxes that are provided by Misk and Freewebs. Use as many common words to describe your site, location, city, ministries, etc. You will see that by googling "chapel ridge lions" or "st joe community church" that we are on the first search page, and we don't pay anything for web promotion. My goal is to simply be very easy to find if they know our name, or at least part of our name.
I get great ideas for webs stuff, podcasting, etc. from www.churchcommunicationspro.com They have a blog entry on how to get free podcast hosting. They also recommend using a blog to create a church website, but I’m not so familiar with using that. Our ideas on this blog entry are a drop in the bucket compared to their resource ideas. They create and host sites too, but we're still happy with ours.
Online Surveys/Registrations: We used www.icebrrg.com to create an online registration form for our VBS (we called it Day Camp). Up to 500 entries for only $9 per month, and you can cancel anytime. It puts all the data in Excel form, so you can download the file and manipulate the registration info any way you like, mail merge for letters, labels, etc. You can do a "How are we doing" survey, or any other online poll you want. The best part is that anyone can enter data for you. For instance, when we had people register by paper for our Day Camp (almost all of our 120 kids registered online), I just gave them to a worker who went home and registered them for us by using the registration link on our website like everyone else.
About online registration for events: if you are targeting anyone under 40, this is a must for any community event that requires registration. By the way, Freewebs offers a way to receive online payments/donations from people using Pay Pal. We haven't used this yet.
Here are sites I’ve created. Nothing fancy, just the basics. And by the way, if you aren't going to update much, keep it very simple. Don't complicate things for online visitors. Cut to the chase. Businesses and outsiders constantly comment on how professional our site looks. If you don't know how to make it pop with all the bells and whistles, go simple and streamlined. In fact, I think the less busy sites communicate faster anyway.
www.chapelridgelions.org for my lions club I joined last year. This is as simple as it gets, but everyone seem to like it.
www.churchatcarmike.com which points to one page we created on our St Joe site, then gives the link to our home page. Purely to advertise where we are. This only cost us the fee for registering the domain at Misk.
Please let me know about any easier and/or cheaper web hosting ideas.
