RESOURCE HIGHLIGHT - Easy, Cheap & Sophisticated Website
SQUARESPACE
EASY, CHEAP & SOPHISTICATED
Before I get into this, let me ask a few question which I would love you to answer to yourself (or comment below!);
- What do you think our website (redeemerchurchcolchester.com) cost to set up?
- What do you think it costs on-goingly?
- Do you think you could design something like this?
- Who do you think designed this?
I'll give the answers later! Church Planting and resources - the key question I ask is 'What's the best I can do with the resources I have?'...then find something better! Church Plant websites seem to cover the whole range from 'Let's just do a Facebook group or a landing page to...a full blown funded awesome website!.' I am convinced websites are our main 'public front door'. Search for churches in your area and look at their websites...what are you first impressions?
Our Website uses Squarespace and answers to the above questions are;
- Set up Cost: £0 - yes really! By that I mean I didnt' pay anyone to design it/code it. Obviously there are hosting costs.
- On-going cost: £100/year...ok £108 when billed annually. That is it! You get a domain name with that too...See https://www.squarespace.com/pricing/
- Could you design something like this? I didn't but...
- Who designed it? A Media guy? It guy? No - me! NO tech training. Bush and sports boy turned pastor.
Some thing that are great about Squarespace;
- Free 14 day trial to design your own website and make a decision
- Great variety of templates
- Drag & Drop design - no coding knowledge needed...but you can go to squarespace online conversations and invariably you get code and are told how to copy and past it to do something!
- Quick and responsive help
- Flexible design - pages and blogs
- Connects to Gmail and MailChimp easily (and much more I expect!)
Not bad for £100 a year eh? I started with a friend creating a Wordpress site...but I found that too confusing to use myself, needed updates and behind the scenes admin...ultimately someone who knows that stuff! I decided it was too complicated (that is how basic my skills are!) and have since done everything myself on Squarespace (I didn't design the logo! I can point you to who did at a great cost though...). One thing I haven't nailed is the SEO stuff - how to get it high up on google search - but there are some great tutorials.
Happy to help
I'd be very happy to help and talk through how I have done what I have done and even get you going - no charge! If you want to make a donation to the Church Plant then great...but no need to:). Email me on info@redeemerchurchcolchester.org or use the contact form on this website.
IMAGES
The images used are also all FREE and you don;t need to attribute and they are license free...a future post will outline WHERE I got them from. Go design a website and let us know if this was helpful by commenting below.
