The new front door--your web site

There's a whole host of home decor shows that focus on first impressions. One in particular often includes a front door makeover.

Web sites have become, in many ways, the new front door for the church. In the last decade or so, do-it-yourself publishing has enabled churches of any size to have their own presence on the web.

So what does your front door say about your church? Does it have curb appeal?

First, let's break this into a couple of segments. Today we'll focus on how people find you.

If you aren't tracking visits to your site and search engine rankings, it's difficult to have a good picture of whether your site is working for you. There are some web sites that offer free visit tracking, with surprising detail, including how long a unique visitor stayed on the site, how many pages were viewed, what page was viewed last and the general location of your visitors.

To see how you're doing in search engines, you can also download software or you can do it manually by periodically entering search terms in a search engine. The dominant search engine is Google, which offers a free alert system that will send you emails as frequently as you prefer to show you where and how often your church name is appearing on the web. Since most people looking for a church home are more likely to search in general terms than for your church name, it's wise to track search results as well for terms such as "churches in Lexington, KY" or "Disciples of Christ churches in Lexington." You can do this manually once a week, which should be sufficient for you to know how your church is doing in these general searches.

If you haven't already, it is important to make yourself more visible by entering search tags into your html code. Tracking Google search results for your area will help you see what search tags are working best. If you don't know how to do this, check your instruction guide for the web publishing software you're using, or do a search. It's fairly easy, even for novices, and can make all the difference.