You can make your own church website - you probably shouldn't
The Taste/Skill Gap
There is a famous quote by Ira Glass (the journalist behind "This American Life") where he talks about taste.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not...”
Basically, what he says is that when you are first starting out in any creative pursuit, you know what you want to make, but you just haven't developed the skill to do it yet. Developing that skill takes many years and usually what you produce in those years isn't very good.
Now Let's Apply This to Church Websites...
It's absolutely possible to create your own church website or to have some hungry teenager in your church do it for you. Programs abound online like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly. Low-cost hosting services have their own (usually awful) web builders. You could even use Google Sites. If you want to feel frustration, you could do what everyone used to do and use a Wordpress theme.
It's not that hard. But it will also not be very good.
Chances are, you haven't given a lot of thought to what should be on a website. You probably don't think a lot about web design and what should and shouldn't be on church websites. Chances are, you are new to this. Even if you are technical and otherwise good at software, you probably are new to the website builder you choose to use.
As Ira Glass said, there is going to be a gap between your taste and your ability to produce. So I have to ask some questions:
- Is your church website really the place you want to practice?
- Do you want to risk looking amateurish in the first place people will look when they consider visiting your church?
And while I'm asking questions:
- Do you really have the time to learn this whole new skill?
I've Been Through the Gap
I made my first church website twenty years ago in 2004. As you can imagine, it was terrible. I ran the gamut of awful church website trends:
- Cutting up Photoshop files (we used to do it).
- Macromedia Dreamweaver
- Adobe Flash
- Awful content management systems (Concrete5, Textpattern, etc.)
- Numerous Wordpress templates.
Then I started doing things from scratch and for a long time, that was awful. Ultimate Church Websites is the fourth custom church website CMS I've built for myself (I've created a few for clients who are still selling websites).
I'm still not a perfect church website designer - but I've worked for twenty years at closing that gap.
You can try to do it yourself - there is nothing wrong with that. But you would probably be better served using someone who has spent twenty years learning the hard way what not to do.
I can create an awesome website for your church. We can get it launched in a week. It's no more money than using many of the web builders, and you get my expertise.
You have enough things to stress over. Let me handle your church website.