Here is an insider’s look at creating a fun place for your visitors to keep coming back to.

Your front page is the window to your church and you want to convey a warm open feeling that people will want to keep searching and click on all your links. A way to do that is by having:   Pictures

Here are some suggestions for good photos for your site:

•  Open arms welcoming you to their site/church
•  Smiling people saying this is a great place to be!
•  Sunday School kids actively listening and participating
•  Group photos in front of church or reading desk
•  Outside shot of church with plants if possible

Adding fresh content to your site

• Posting events shows that your church is alive and people attend
• Create an atmosphere where people will come back to see what’s next
• If there is a local event, even if it’s not church based, consider letting your community know about it
• Lectures, Talks, Timmy’s baseball game, Sarah’s dance recital

Calendar of Events

• Let’s your audience plan ahead
• Shows congregation that you are forward thinking

The more you can involve your church with the site, the more it becomes a useful tool. Educating your church is a good thing. Have fun with it, we are the ones who get to shape the future of our church!

So, what do you do if you don’t have events coming up? Create them! Get active within the church. Potlucks at the park, car wash with the Sunday School kids, Ice cream after Wednesday night church (always a favorite of mine). Our churches are alive with activity and we need to let the members know and have a place they can come back to incase they miss church on Sunday and Wednesday.

Have any ideas of your own? Please share them in the comments below!

We’re very happy to have helped The Albert Baker Fund design and build their new website. It’s much easier to use than the old site and is aimed squarely at helping Christian Scientists find funding assistance in their educational journey.

Visit the site: http://www.albertbakerfund.org/

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a contribution towards the Church Alive concept that Christian Scientists have been thinking about for the last year.  We’re looking forward to meeting people at Annual Meeting in Boston this year!  Find us and say hi

Text written by Share the Practice founder Gabriel Serafini and was brought to life in animated video form by David Miller.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any thoughts about our vision — want to help?  Have any ideas for how to help make it a reality?  We’re just getting started!

We’re quite pleased to announce the launch of a new site for the Joint Broadcast Committee for Colorado - http://christiansciencecolorado.org/

The site features content in English as well as Spanish, listings for 30 churches and reading rooms in the state of Colorado, as well as a nice map showing the locations of each.

Here are some comments shared about the just-launched site:

I’ve just been browsing around on the site, and I’m very impressed.  This is a beautiful web site, and I’m very grateful for all the work you’ve put into it.

All of your hard work has been worth it…the site is very professional and impressive.  …  This is a very credible outreach to our community.

This is a pretty inspiring talk given by Robert McVey on 4/16/77 to the Arizona Institutional Committee about how he discovered Christian Science while in prison at maximum-security Soledad Prison in California.  The talk is about 54 minutes in length.

Listen:

The Dominion Foundation, based in Richmond, Virginia, USA is a benevolent funding organization established solely to support Christian Science home nursing.

We’re pleased to announce that they now have a new website that we helped build for them.  We built a simple child theme for them based on the excellent Twenty Ten theme that mainly adds their logo to the header.  They really like the default header image so that’s the one we’re launching with for this project.

Check them out if you are a Christian Science nurse who does home nursing care, or if you are a patient who has incurred costs relating to Christian Science nursing care in your home.

http://dominionfoundation.net/

We’re very pleased to announce the launch of the new website for the Christian Science Nursing Network (http://csnnetwork.org).  Since this is an off-conference year for them, the redesign focused mainly on giving them a system that they could make easy updates to and focuses on fundraising and their excellent Vision Now! newsletter.

Check out this neat iPhone app called PracTrak made by Dale Matheny / Ray of Light Software — it looks like it’s an all-in-one Christian Science practitioner billing and tracking system for your patients on your iPhone.  Could be an interesting solution if you don’t have a better way of doing it already.  It currently costs $49.99 but may very well be worth it if it meets your needs.

Click here to view or purchase PracTrak in the Apple App Store

If you are just looking for a web-based billing solution instead of an iPhone only app, we also highly recommend trying out Freshbooks — it is really easy to use and customize and has a free account you can use to test it out.  It’s what we use to manage our own invoicing and it’s really nice.

P.S. If you’re a practitioner and have tried out the PracTrak app or use some other method of billing your patients we’d love it if you shared your experiences in the comments below.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of a redesigned site for Third Church of Christ, Scientist in Dallas Texas (http://www.thirdchurchdallas.org).  This new site features a member’s only area, calendar of events and a featured slideshow on the homepage.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialCSChurch

You can also see their ‘making of’ blog here: http://theproductionpost.blogspot.com/