Someday parish leaders will view their online parish presence as an essential professional pastoral ministry. Members and visitors already expect that. Unfortunately, they are often disappointed. The measure of the effectiveness of the parish website is a combination of quality of design, the usefulness of content, and the overall message. A professional pastoral website design invites visitors in and facilitates easy access to their interest points. This is done through:…
Category: website
120 Posts
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Roads and Country Lanes: Preparing Your Holy Week Posts
Palm Sunday is this coming weekend and it is time to make sure that we have included meaningful and helpful online posts as part of our communications for all the events that will take place during Holy Week. This means preparing posts for the website and any social media sites your parish has. The first thing we have to take care of is answering the questions people have when they…
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Learning from Website Analytics
Hopefully, your website developer included an analytics tool with your website. Many sites use the free Google Analytics tool. You do have to have a Gmail account to get it, but that is free also. You can sign up your website (property is what Google calls it) for the tool when you are logged into your Gmail account at https://analytics.google.com. When you sign-up Google gives you a “code” which needs…
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Lenten Video to Share
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. The wonderful, liturgically rich and spirituality engaging season of Lent begins. You have been preparing for weeks and now it is here. For this week’s blog post, I have prepared a video meditation for the First Sunday of Lent which you can use later this week on your website and on social media sites if you like. Or you can just a take moment to quietly…
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Lent 2019 Parish Website and Social Media Preplanning Worksheet
In four weeks, Lent 2019 begins. Lent is a special time of grace in the Church and we can support and foster our visitors in their desire to grow in holiness through inspiring and welcoming images, thoughtful reflections and links to meaningful content. It is not too late or too early to preplan your Lenten online communications. Ash Wednesday is March 6. I have created a preplanning worksheet which I…
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What Visitors Expect from Your Website
In considering how welcoming a parish (or any other) website is, we need to look beyond including the word “Welcome” on the site which as you know, I think is important. We need to offer what visitors can legitimately expect us to provide.