Review Your Website
As parishes work to return to a normal stride after almost two years of COVID related disruption it's a good time to take inventory’ of a wide array of parish good practices. One of them is to tend to your parish website.
While Facebook and other social media (more on that in a future issue) are of course an important -perhaps primary- method of communicating your parish to the world - the website still remains your communication front door. Many parishes are experiencing a flurry of new people and inquirers. So its clear that people are looking for churches -- Orthodox Churches.
This check list will help you be prepared:
1. Does the home page of your website prominently display services times, church address, parish phone number?
2. Have you asked someone not affiliated with your parish to offer a bare knuckled review of your website? Ask them to find items that are unclear -- perhaps "insider only info" that may be off-putting to inquirers.
3. Do you have photos of smiling people liberally displayed on your site? If you have a page describing a class show people in the class --not just words. Do you invite people to join your choir? Show a photo of singing during liturgy. Coffee hour? Same thing. (If you can't find anyone smiling that can lead to other areas of focus!)
4. Have you removed images of people no longer affiliated with the parish?
5. Have you included photos of any recent baptisms or adult Chrismations? Project an image of growth and renewal. Surely someone is smiling then!
6. Is a button to access online donations easy to find? (If you haven't noticed most people do not carry cash. Some say checks will be virtually extinct by 2026.)
7. Is your services and events calendar up to date?(FYI: “Merry Christmas/Christ is Born 2017” is now out of date.)
8. Have you added info about important events for the next 4-5 months? Particularly those that would be of interest to inquirers? Do these events indicate a serious Christ centered church --or do they sound more like the Rotary club?
9. Do you have a link to Live Streaming of Services? Many parishes experiencing new faces find the visitors first checked things out via live stream.
10..Has your site gotten cluttered over the years? Do some winter clean-up.
Need further help? Just ask.
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