12 Reasons Every Church Needs a Web Site
(Including at least 10 really good ones)

Potential Visitors can find you with Google
Service Times
Map
Contact Information
Calendar of Events
Photos
Link to your denomination
Your denomination will link to you
Descriptions of all your church’s ministries
Link to resources to aid the congregation and site visitors
Sermon Podcast
Pastor’s Blog

Package A, the “online business card”

The online business card is a simple one page web site with:

Either your existing logo, or your name written in a nice font
Your choice of font color and background color
Service times, map, phone number, and email address all on one page with up to two photos and up to 500 words. More could be added at an additional cost.

Costs would be $10/year for your domain name, $60/year for hosting, and $200 for my labor.

Package B, the “small, simple site”

BANG! Web Development can create a small, simple web site for very little money. This site would include:

Either your existing logo, or your name written in a nice font
Your choice of font color and background color
Home, Service Times, Map, Contact, and Links pages. Each page could have up to two photos and up to 500 words
A simple top banner and navigation menu that would appear on every page

Costs would be $10/year for your domain name, $60/year for hosting, and $600 for programming and setup. Additional pages could be added for $50 each.

Package C, the “thing of beauty”

Package C includes everything in Package B, plus a professional graphic designer will spend between 10 and 13 hours enhancing the look and feel of your web site. This would transform your simple web site into a work of art – a thing of beauty. Many churches feel this is an essential step to getting visitors through the door.

Costs would be $10/year for your domain name, $60/year for hosting, and $1900 for labor (graphic design, programming, setup, etc.). Additional pages could be added for $50 each.

Further Enhancements to Package B or C

An Admin area can be added to your site, protected by a username and password, and powered by a database and dynamic web page technology. This enables you to add:

An Events Calendar. You log in, enter the date, time, event name, details, and contact information. Then on the public site, all the upcoming events will appear in a list. When the event passes, it will automatically be removed.
A Photo Gallery. You log in, upload pictures, and add captions. On the public site, people can go to the Photo Gallery page and browse through all the pictures.
Sermons – You record the sermons and save them as Mp3 audio files. Then log in, upload the sermon, add a date, title, and speaker name. These can then be downloaded by anyone on the web and listened to with any Mp3 player, including the IPod.
Any text block on the site can be made “dynamic”, which means you can log in and change the text at will.
Staff page – Log in and enter the name, title, contact info, display order, and upload a photo. The staff will all appear on the public site and you can update it at any time.
These concepts can all be adapted to suit your specific needs.

Adding the database that powers these features will add $30 a year to your hosting costs. The initial database set up and set up of the log in functionality is a one-time charge of $200. After that, any of the features mentioned could be set up for between $100 and $200 each.

So, as you can see, the price for a church web site can start at less than $300. A large, beautiful, fully functional web site could easily be made for under $5000.

Some Example Web Sites: