Get Your Church Online: What is Your Address?
This is a guest post by Tom McFarlin
When it comes to maintaining an online presence, the modern church is not exactly flourishing. To make matters even more challenging, the church is still about four years behind everyone else with respect to technology.
Finding – and affording – good designers and good developers is hard so it’s typically up to volunteers to step up to help contribute to the cause.
But there’s a problem: The Internet is a big place. A really big place.
When you sit down to begin building a site, there’s a lot of stuff out there you must sift through – various services, applications, technologies, and so on. Unless you’ve got a background in web development, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all of this information let alone trying to even find a starting point.
Processing all of this stuff is like drinking from a fire hose. But I’d like to try to slow the flow a little bit.
Each week, I’m going to toss out a couple tools, utilities, applications, and/or best practices that are geared towards those of you that are looking to bring your church online but lack the time to invest in all the research.
Ready? Let’s go.
Where do I start?
Forget about development. Simply finding a place to begin is an incredibly daunting task.
Do I build the site first, or should I find a good host? I don’t even know how to register a domain. What’s the best editor for creating a website? What’s CSS? JavaScript? What’s coffee gotta do with it? It looks nasty. MySQL? I didn’t even know I had an SQL! I thought Ajax was some kind of bleach.
Yeah. I know. So. much. stuff. But that’s okay – we’ll get to it eventually. There’s really no well-defined, clear-cut place to start so we’ll pick one.
Address Availability
Your website has gotta have a place to live. Sure, there are a lot of free hosts out there, but rarely are you gonna find a church site hosted at Blogspot or Tripod. A domain name is your address on the information superhighway.
That was a lame pun and I apologize.
Still, if you want to have a relevant, easy-to-remember site then it helps to have a good domain name. Here are three services – in no particular order – that make it incredibly easy to see if your domain name is available all of which feature the results in real time.
Instant Domain Search is arguably the simplest of the three. Enter the domain name that you’re interested in purchasing and it will give you the availability of the .com, .net, and .org equivalents in addition to several registrars that can be used to purchase it.
PCNames is very similar to Instant Domain Search in that it will provide results for your requested domain as well as a set of available registrars; however, this service also returns available domains featuring the suffixes for .info, .biz, .us, and .mobi.
Domai.nr is the mother of all web 2.0 domain searches. It will scan all of the available domains for the aforementioned suffixes as well as domains that can use the domain as part of the suffix. For example, say you’re considering purchasing a domain for a family night supper-oriented church called Lets Eat It. Domai.nr will return all available results including a suggestion for LetsEat.It. The word is part of the domain? Yep. Ultimate creativity.
There you go: three free applications you can use to begin setting up your church’s online presence. But what’s in a name? If you’ve got nothing to show for it, it’s not gonna be worth much.
Next, we’ll take a look at some of the more popular web hosts and things to consider before purchasing some space for your stuff.
[Image from B Tal]
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23 Responses to “Get Your Church Online: What is Your Address?”
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[...] be using it in the future to search for domains?And don’t forget, a good domain is part of getting your church online! Make it a part of your online strategy! Share Buzz it! tweetmeme_source = 'churchcrunch'; [...]
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Open Thread: Pets in the Office? 
This is going to be a great series. I just wish I did not have to wait until next week.
you've got something big going on?
what do you mean? Next week? or just in the future?
Thanks Kyle.
Just sit tight for the rest. Patience is a virtue.
[/cliche-nonsense]
This is one of those posts you bookmark and then when someone calls you and says, "How do I…" you just forward them this link instead of taking an hour to compose an email teaching them how to do this.
Great job, Tom. Very useful for ministry, especially those that don't have an IT staff.
peace | dewde
word up.
Thanks! I hope to be able to keep this thing rollin' for a while. It's a rich topic.
Where's the fast forward button for this series?
Or do I have to wait until all of them play, and then I can just watch them at my convenience on my DVR?
I demand streaming blog posts!
seriously, this is going to be a great series.
Indeed
Great post brother. I am personally concerned about getting the church to use the advancements of the information technology and a web presence. I even wrote my own small article titled "How to start your own Christian blog?" I will add a link to this post under recommended reading.
http://www.virtualpreacher.org/how-to-start-your-...
However in Sri Lanka where I live starting a web site is more of a matter related to security (2 churches were attacked within the past 2 weeks) rather than, technical knowledge or finances. Going online as a church can expose information about our churches, which would benefit anti Christians.
Yohan, thanks for sharing this. I'll be completely honest: I often take our freedom in America for granted when it comes to setting up churches, web sites, and other religious institutions. When it comes to this kind of stuff, security and persecution aren't things that we typically have to think about.
I really do appreciate the comment.
Thanks Tom, also thanks for following me on Twitter. Please remember me & my wife and our church in your prayers.
Thanks for bringing in another perspective on this.
peace | dewde
Awesomeness! Can't wait for more.
There are some other cool domain lookup tools listed here:
http://webdesignledger.com/tools/10-useful-tools-...
I recently got excited to see a domain was available according to these types of domain checkers only to learn when I went to buy that it had been registered long ago. These services get it right most of the time, but it's a good idea to check your short list against a definitive whois lookup service, such as http://whois.domaintools.com/insert domain name]
There are some other cool domain lookup tools listed here:
http://webdesignledger.com/tools/10-useful-tools-...
I recently got excited to see a domain was available according to these types of domain checkers only to learn when I went to buy that it had been registered long ago. These services get it right most of the time, but it's a good idea to check your short list against a definitive whois lookup service, such as http://whois.domaintools.com/insert domain name]
thanks! webdesignledger is the bomb. i've been subscribed for a while!
Thanks for adding these to the list! I wanted to continue cataloging tools people had found useful.