Advertise with Google for Practically Nothing

If someone does a Google search for churches in your city, how would you like to be the first result?

Lots of people these days – especially the under-45 crowd – search online instead of the phone book. Google has created Google AdWords. They offer a starter edition, which will be perfect for us rookies.

How to Do It

Once you clicked the “Sign Up” button they’ll ask about which edition you want (starter), and your business’ (i.e. church’s) country and phone number. Odds are they know you already, but if they don’t you can fill in your information.

The exciting part is you get to write two lines of text up to 35 characters each – roughly a short sentence. You get to give your potential visitor a short message. It’s tough to think of. If they’re looking for a church, they need something. You want to tell your visitor what need your church can fill. You can change it later, so think seasonally. I’m writing this in November, so think Christmas. Maybe your church is family-focused (enticing parents with young children), or maybe it’s a place of healing (for depressed people, who only get worse around the holidays).

After that, you get to pick who sees your ad by selecting keywords. Google suggests a bunch based on popular searches. Go ahead and pick some, but also type in some in the box on the left. You can change it later, so don’t sweat getting it perfect the first time.

What’s it Cost?

Time for the money part! You get to tell Google how much you’re willing to spend per month. You only pay when someone clicks your ad. Once your budget has been reached your ad won’t show up until next month. It’s pretty simple, and gives you a lot of security against wasting money.

And that’s pretty much it. Once you give them your billing information they’ll start running your ad. You can update your ad whenever you want, maybe to promote a big event or season. If you get comfortable with it, you can move to the standard account (instead of the starter) and run multiple ads. It’s really flexible, and Google does everything they can to make you comfortable, especially with money.

Wrapping Up

There are people looking for churches. If you want to be found, you’ve got to make it easy on them. Since Google is the most common search tool around, it makes sense to focus on it.

Of course, you’ll want to have a great website for these visitors to go to. Next time we’ll pick up the Dynamic Church Website series by going over how to design the look and layout of a site. There’s a few basic principles to follow to make it appealing and effective.

Replace Words Quickly

In your word processor (Word, WordPerfect, etc.) hold CTRL and hit ‘H’ (you can let go of CTRL). Type in the word or phrase you want to change, then what you want to change it to. You can make the search case-sensitive if you want (for instance, replacing “he” with the divine “He”). I use it to get rid of double spacing after periods a lot.

It’s usually in the same menu as the Find function, which is CTRL+F.

Making a Dynamic Church Website, Part 1

Dynamic is a fancy word for something that changes.  In web design, it means a website that changes automatically (that is, without you making the changes manually).  We’re going to walk through the steps for using blog software to manage your church website’s content dynamically.

Instead of explaining, let’s use an example I put together for my home church, Parkway Presbyterian.

Dynamic elements include:

• Navigation (just under the blue header; ‘Home, About Parkway, etc.’)
• Pictures (they’re a slideshow!)
• “Upcoming Events” announcements
• Subpages (the stuff besides the homepage)

Using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)

Just like this blog, I use WordPress as the bones of the site.  You can download your own copy at www.wordpress.org.  You’ll need to already have webspace, a domain, and access to your FTP (comment or e-mail me if you have no clue what those things are).  You should have a little experience with websites and installing programs; if you don’t, try to find a helper in your congregation (or ask me!).  The WordPress site has instructions for installing.

It’s All About Themes

WordPress uses what’s called “Themes,” which dicate the look of your site.  You can also write your own or modify an existing theme – which I did for the example.  For those with some HTML know-how, you basically find the parts of the site that are dynamic (written in PHP) and do your HTML around them.

For the far less savvy, just download a Theme you like.  There are free and pay themes.  The two places I like to check are SmashingMagazine.com and ChurchTheme.com.

Later on I’ll discuss how I customized a free theme to create the Parkway site.  Your own church website will probably have some similar needs and some different.  Drop me a comment if you’ve got a specific idea you want to try and we’ll work through it here.

We Feel Fine

Ever wanted to know how your neighborhood is feeling?  You must try We Feel Fine.

What the heck is Twitter?

Twitter is a lot like blogging with two major exceptions: 1) You’re limited to 400 characters with no formatting (no bold, italics, etc.), and 2) You can “tweet” from anything that can send messages, including e-mail, cell phone, PDA, or on the Twitter website.  People use it to express themselves throughout the day in a hundred ways.  Individually a “tweet” might seem lame, but all together they create a picture of a person’s life.

We Feel Fine (WFF) pulls people’s messages sent on Twitter that include the word “feel,” so you get messages with permutations of “I feel,” “we feel,” “it feels,” etc.  WFF lets you filter these messages by city, sex, age… even weather!

There’s a few ways to view it all.  Start by clicking the “Open We Feel Fine” box.  When you get in you’ll see a big cloud of dots.  Each dot is a message or “tweet.”  Click on one to read it.  On the bottom left of your screen there’s five options (the type is kinda small, sorry).  Try them out – my favorite is “Murmurs,” which shows messages decending in a continuous train.  ”Mobs” and “Metrics” are also excellent for getting a pulse on your area.

Wrapping Up

It’s hard to find useful information on your community beyond statistics.  We Feel Fine is just one web application that can give you a quick dose.  Whatever you happen to see, it’s usually a healthy reality check for what people really say and feel.

Typography Tips (Fonts!)

Churches tend to put out a lot of printed material.  Odds are you don’t have a professional graphic designer around to handle these things.  Good typography is a great way to spruce up a design. For us novices all a big fancy word like typography means is fonts!

Basic Tips

 

• Don’t use more than three fonts.
• Use sans-serif for headers, serif for body text (serifs are the little feet on fonts like Cambria or Times New Roman, so sans-serif means without serifs on fonts like Helvetica or Arial).
• Don’t go smaller than 12pt, 11pt in an emergency.
• Leave some white space for heaven’s sake!  Space between paragraphs, wide margins… wherever you can give the eye a little breathing room.

 

My favorite quickie guide is Seth Godin’s Seven Tips for Amateur Type Designers.  Very short and very excellent.

Advanced Tricks, or “It Doesn’t Fit!”

There are three places where I’ve learned to adjust text to make it fit, either to squeeze in or spread out.  None of them are font size!

 

• Paragraph Spacing: Odds are you have a menu to change paragraph settings (in Word it’s under Format > Paragraph).  You can add spacing before and after.  Adding space before headings or after paragraphs usually looks real nice.  Work in 6pt increments and see what looks nice.
• Kerning: Kerning is an old typography term for reducing the space between letters in a word, usually by fitting them together using each letter’s natural space (like tucking an ‘r’ into the space around an ‘o’).  Kerning is usually found in the character spacing menu (in Word that’s Format > Character Spacing).  Don’t condense kerning more than 1/20th the font’s normal size (so no more than .6pt kerning for a 12pt font).
• Line Spacing: In that paragraph menu from before you’ll probably see line spacing near paragraph spacing.  It’s usually either set in terms of ’sp’ or just says ‘Single.’  You can reduce line spacing by as much as 10% for squeezing.  Expanding to 1.15sp looks fantastic when you’re not crunched.

Finding New Fonts

Your one-stop-shop should be dafont.com – it’s free, it’s got lots of useful categories, and you can type in the word(s) for a preview of them in each font.  Don’t use more than one crazy font in a project, and only use it for big title words.  Your main text should always be a familiar, simple font like Cambria or Helvetica.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for now.  You should have a lot of helpful tips and tools for your creative ideas.  Look around and see what other people are doing, too.  You can take lots of inspiration from other churches or websites like Church Marketing Sucks or Church Relevance.  Good luck, and let me know how your designs go!