Creating and maintaining a personal website is far simpler than doing the same tasks for a church or ministry, or any organization, for that matter. Even when you acknowledge this, the reality is often times harsher that you expect or imagine. When you start to feel overburdened, take some time to gather yourself and gain some new perspectives for your situation. Then, work together with your leaders for a sustainable ministry solution.

Photo credits: I found the image for this article on Flickr and it was made available under a Creative Commons license - CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The last thing you want is an ineffective web site. Your church web site must share your story and connect with your intended audience. To do this, you must determine who will build it and maintain it and what tools and resources they will need.

You also need to know what to look for when evaluating possible platforms for your church web site. Have a clear set of requirements ready as you look for your solution for an effective web site.

Millions of people are on the Internet every day - how do you get just some of them to visit your site? Here are some easy to follow guidelines for building your site to draw people to it. Start by looking at the URL, the title and the description of each page.

There are a variety of skills needed to build and maintain a church's web site - technical, editorial, graphical, planning, teaching and leading. Rare is the person who has all these skills AND has the time to devote to your church's web site. Clearly defining the roles and skills needed will help you build a team you need for your web ministry.

Point. Click, Type, Click. Drag, Drop. Share. Take a fresh look at your website - it might be easy, but it ain't simple! The number of easy-to-use site building and publishing tools is climbing, but the task of building and maintaining a good website is not getting any simpler. Until now.

The concepts are easily learned and, with proper discipline, you can have an effective, enjoyable website for your church.

Introduced in Church Websites 101: Easy. Not Simple, we're now going to dig deeper into the strategies you can employ to build and maintain a more effective website for your church or ministry.

The easy fixes are things you have, or should have, direct control over - the content is yours. This is all about what you post online. Examine your topics, your schedule for posting and updating, the language you use and your presentation. Do it now and keep doing it - establish a discipline (be a disciple) for your ministry.

3rd in a series introduced in Church Websites 101: Easy. Not Simple. Last time, we fixed the easy stuff - now you'll need a little tech savvy to take care of some of these things. If you've selected a good CMS, most of this will be easy. If you're having to edit the pages or configuration directly - not so easy.

If you've gotten this far, you are well ahead of the majority of non-profit organizations. You have overcome the hurdle of publishing online and have developed a discipline for regular updates. Now, you're getting into some of the finer details of effectively sharing content online. You may also find your choice of tools is helping or maybe it is limiting your efforts.

If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get lost. And, you'll see a lot of new places!

Setting goals is all about knowing where you're going and knowing when you arrive. We all have heard about S.M.A.R.T. goals - now is the time to put them work. Goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. Let's see how that applies to our church website and the strategy you are developing.

This addition to Church Websites 101 will step away from the technology for a bit, because this is actually more difficult to master than the technology.

A conversation consists of more than 2 people talking - it also involves listening by all parties involved. What does this have to do with your church website? Everything!

Are you using your website as another vehicle for broadcasting your message, or are you also using it to listen to what others are saying? A recent study by LifeWay Research indicates the majority of churches (even those with fewer than 50 in attendance each week) maintain websites for their church. Yet, of those, only about 40% are actually engaging their members and visitors in conversations on their websites through features such as prayer requests.

Having a web strategy for your church is really a part of having a communications strategy for you church - your website is just one aspect of all your communications media. Even your web strategy will be broken into several components - a website, possibly a Facebook page and a Twitter account, maybe other online channels like YouTube and MySpace.

There are many pieces to your web strategy, but just having all the pieces doesn't mean they all fit together - yet!

Just like shaking the box won't assemble the jigsaw puzzle for you, you need to have a picture of how it will all fit together and then take steps to make it all happen. Today, we'll look at the pieces and the steps in the context of an overall strategy.