Starting a Christian Website

Figure Out Who Your Audience Is

Starting a Christian website is a challenging and potentially rewarding undertaking. Tens of millions of Christians in the United States and around the world compose your potential audience. So if your website is well designed, focused and offers users the content or products they want, you could potentially have a very popular, and potentially profitable, online Christian business.

Your first step in developing a Christian website is to determine what you're going to offer. Many websites simply offer content such as articles, news stories and blog postings that appeal to an ideologically, philosophically or religiously like-minded audience. Others retail merchandise. Still other combine these two offerings. You'll have to ask yourself what you intend to present to the people visiting your website, and what kind of logistical support network you're going to have in place to underpin these offerings. For instance, if your website is going to exclusively offer content, will it be articles and blog postings exclusively provided by you, or will you hire a team of writers? If you're going to offer merchandise, you'll need to figure out how much inventory you'll need to keep on hand, who will fulfill orders and what kind of online payment methods you're going to offer your customers.

You'll next need to determine which part of the Christian universe your website is going to focus on. You could try to appeal to Christians of all denominations, or focus more precisely on particular branches of Christianity, such as Catholicism, Lutheranism, Methodism or Mormonism. There are pros and cons to either approach. In attempting to garner the attention of all Christians, you may attract a larger audience. But your website will not have the precise focus that it would have if you focused on one specific group, and you may deter people interested in content or products that are more specifically tailored to their specific Christian beliefs. It's good to study the kinds of websites that are already in existence, and figure out what particular niche you could fill.

Determine Your Revenue Model

If your website focuses only on content or does not operate for profit, figure out how you're going to pay the costs of website development and hosting. You'll either have to solicit donations from your readers, display web advertisements, or fund the enterprise out of your own pocket or the coffers of a benefactor. If your website is for profit but you don't offer any products, you'll have to make money either by offering a subscription service or displaying advertisements. With so much free content out there, it's very unlikely that you'll be able to gain enough subscribers to make a viable return on investment, so you'll probably have to rely on display advertisements. At this point, you'll have to ask yourself if you'll display ads from all kinds of advertisers, including those offering secular content or products, or if you're going to offer ad space only to similarly themed Christian organizations.

Next, decide if your website will feature user interactivity. You have to figure out if you want to let people comment on your products, articles or blog postings, or if you'd rather restrict feedback to only selectively chosen emails to the editor. Provisioning for comments and message boards has become very popular on many websites over the last few years, with website owners reasoning that customers will be more likely to frequent their domains if they can express their opinions. The major downside is that spammers, people with axes to grind and other unpleasant parties will abuse the system, forcing you to either moderate comments yourself or hire someone to do this for you. You could leave all commenting unfiltered and rely on your community of readers to police itself, but if too much distracting, irritating material is allowed onto your website, it's possible that many of your readers will be deterred from coming back.

Promote Your Website

Work on actually developing your website. If you know how to design websites, and are proficient in programming languages like HTML and Java, you can consider coding your website yourself. If not, you'll need to hire a website developer. If you hire a designer, make sure that he understands how your website is supposed to look and feel to your intended audience. As much as possible, you want to cater to the aesthetic preferences of your intended audience, and it's imperative your designer has a good idea what these preferences are when he creates layouts, user interfaces and other components of the website. Once the basic coding is completed, and the website is uploaded onto the Internet, make sure that you run a thorough battery of tests to make sure everything looks good and runs well. Solicit feedback from as many people as you can before going live, as it's much harder to correct or change things once you have to deal with customers and readers.

Finally, promote your website. Word of mouth is often the best, and certainly cheapest, method for gaining attention. Tell all your friends, and have them tell their friends. It's also advisable to have a blog, even if the focus of your website is products and not articles and editorials. Use the blog to tell people about what's new and what you have planned for the future. The more thorough and relevant your blog, the more likely search engines will find and index your website. Your other alternative is to advertise, either on search engines like Google and Microsoft Live, or other similar websites. You can also advertise offline, either in print publications or by sponsoring events, competitions and giveaways. However you advertise, make sure to not spend too much when you're just starting out.

Resources

• Tutorial on Creating a Website