A quick and easy way to build a website for your religious community

For many years we at Vocation Promotion have been recommending beautiful, unique websites for religious communities.

But what if you want something simpler?

There are options today that allow a community to build a website from a simple template that is inexpensive, and which you can easily update on your own.

A little background: up to now, we have been building websites on the popular WordPress platform, which is used on about thirty percent of websites around the world. But now we are also offering to build a website for you on one of the simpler, templated platforms available. The ones we like are GoDaddy.com, Weebly.com, and Wix.com.

The above website, built by Vocation Promotion/TreeFrogClick, Inc. is built on the GoDaddy platform. 

Why chose one of these simpler websites? Let’s look at the advantages of the two kinds of platforms.

WordPress or Squarespace websites – plusses and minuses

• Beautiful and unique.
• Well-suited for search engine optimization (SEO).
• Unlimited number of blog posts.
• Many, many features.
• Are mobile-friendly.
• Cost more.

You also have to hire a programmer to build it, and maintain it throughout the year. (Regular plugin updates)

Template-based websites – plusses and minuses

• Less expensive. Maybe half as much as WordPress websites.
• You can build it by yourself, and don’t have to hire a programmer to maintain it.
• Are mobile-friendly.
• Look like a typical, or cookie-cutter website.
• They have limits to the number of pages. GoDaddy’s limit is 50 pages, for example.
• Not well suited for SEO, or for aggressive promotion features.

Why should you consider a new website anyway?

If your website is mobile-friendly and meets your needs, that is fine. However, many religious community websites are not mobile-friendly. Or it’s just time for a redesign.

If they are not mobile-friendly, they will lose as much as 91% of younger viewers who tend to use mobile devices and not desktops. We found that nearly one-fourth of websites of religious communities that belong to the IRL or the CMSWR are nearly invisible to viewers. See our article, “24% of religious websites are nearly invisible.” 

Millennials use mobile 91% over desktop. Thus, websites designed ten or more years ago typically look very squeezed-up on a mobile phone. Their images and text are hopelessly crunched up and unable to read. If they require scrolling around, millennials will not have patience with this. See our article, “Mobile-friendly review: three religious websites that miss the mark.”

Build it yourself?

If you have someone in your community who is tech-savvy, you can build it yourself. A five-page website built on a platform such as GoDaddy might take you ten to eleven hours, as it did for us recently. However, preparing images and logos can be time-consuming and require a lot of learning if you do not have these skills. If you have a domain already, you will probably have to log into your domain registrar and then repoint what are called the DNS settings to the new website host.

It can be daunting. Why not have experts do it for you?

We at Vocation Promotion will be happy to build a template-based website for you, and take care of all the details. We have been building websites for Catholic religious communities since 2003. Call us at the number at the top of this page, or contact us to get started.