At Church Edit, we often come across churches without a ‘traditional’ church building, who are looking for a website as a way to provide a ‘church front’ and also for validation that they exist to those that may hear about them through word-of-mouth.
Living in an internet age, many people utilise the internet as a tool to search for answers to queries and to find information on something that they may have heard about. The early church spread through word-of-mouth and it is still the predominant method of growth that is happening today, a website provides a mechanism for word-of-mouth to turn into discovery.
The team at Freshwaters Christian Fellowship recognised the importance that a website can have early on in their ministry and have created websites for themselves in the past. They approached Church Edit because they were looking for something quite specific in regards to design and they wanted the ability to be able to update the website content themselves, alongside the capability of membership features.
Although Church Edit’s packages come with a wide range of free templates, the Design Service allowed Freshwaters Christian Fellowship to have a website design that was completely tailored to them.
As a church without a traditional church building, the design of the website’s front page was of particular interest to Freshwaters, Pastor Ron Kingsmill told us: “We are not a traditional church in the sense that people can see us on the street and identify us as a church, our website is the main avenue for people to find us and to find out more about us. Having a really good website, particularly a good homepage is an important way for our church to make that first impression.”
Websites are a great way to make a first impression, however having an online presence can be more complex and so Church Edit gives you the ability to add various widgets to your home page, such as Facebook and Twitter widgets, a tool which Ron found particularly useful: “Church Edit helps to create links between our website and social media presence, having the ability to bring these together is an important aspect to us.”
The internet has allowed the church to become far more accessible to society, reaching people groups that it may not have been able to reach in previous generations. It has also made a way for church life to become a lot more mobile, providing the ability to be connected to church throughout the day and week.
Freshwaters Christian Fellowship are a church that are embracing this change in society and they would happily recommend Church Edit as way to help other churches share their vision and message with society.
“If a church wanted a specific design service, then we would recommend Church Edit. We are really pleased with the service, and even if they just wanted to make use of the free templates, there are many to choose from and it is a quick way to get a good website up and running. We are really impressed with how easy it is to update the content of the website ourselves, being cloud based is brilliant because we can update the website from anywhere! In the past we’ve had software packages to create our website and if you wanted to update the content, then changes could only be made on a specific PC. The level of security that Church Edit allows us to create is great, we can give various team members different editing abilities and access rights over specific pages.” - Ron Kingsmill, Pastor at Freshwaters Christian Fellowship.