How to Put Your Sermons on Your Church Website
Putting sermons on your church's website gives the community a way to easily learn about your message. An updated website that includes your weekly sermon offers potential church members a chance to preview what your house of worship has to offer.
Consider uploading both the transcript of the sermon as well as an audio recording.
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Instructions
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Audio Sermons
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Talk to your sound technicians and find out what capabilities they have for audio recording. They should be able to record to a digital Mp3 file. If they can only record on audio tape, your sound system needs an upgrade.
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Once you have the audio Mp3 file of your sermon created, you'll need a place to store it. Depending on your web host, it may or may not be wise to put all these files on the server hosting your church website. Put your files instead on a site like libsyn.com. LibSyn is meant for large audio files, and your storage availability expands each month so you don't run out of space to hold everything. Bandwidth with LibSyn is unmetered (meaning there is no cap on the number of people per month who can access your sermons).
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When you're ready, upload your sermons and create a separate post for each (LibSyn automatically generates a blog for you.) Note: If you don't want to be published in LibSyn's directory be sure to uncheck that option.
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Create a link on your church's website to the location of each sermon, or alternatively to your main LibSyn page itself where your sermons can be found. You can purchase a separate domain name to direct people from the church site to your audio files. Or you can use a subdomain from your church site.
Transcripts
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Transcribe your sermon and format it neatly in a word processing program.
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Using your PDF maker of choice, create your PDF from your word processing file. If you don't have the full Adobe package, you can download OpenOffice from openoffice.org. OpenOffice is a free word processing program that has a PDF maker built-in.
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Upload the PDF file to your website's file manager. Be sure to read the FAQ for your web host, as the instructions for this are different for each web host.
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Following your web host's instructions, create a link to your sermon PDF file on your website so people can download your sermon transcripts.
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Tips & Warnings
If your sound technicians can only record on cassette, those tapes can be converted to digital files. You can find instructions on how to accomplish this at andybrain.com. A second option is to later re-record your sermons in audacity and convert to Mp3 from there. Audacity is free audio editing software that allows you to record, edit, and export audio to a digital format.
