Creating a website for a house of worship comes along with a few special considerations for the designer/developer. The site must not only be built according to the current industry standards but also make the appropriate appeals to the moral values of the parishioners.
Gathering Inspiration and Installing a Theme
Seeking inspiration for a site can start with a task as simple as viewing other popular sites. From there, you should have an idea of what you might want your new site to look like.
BoldGrid simplifies the translation process from idea to action with the intuitive Inspirations phase. Once you’ve chosen a website category, you can sift through various themes until you land on one you like.
Creating Meaningful Content
You may have noticed that your new “Inspiration” comes with starter content to serve as example. We strongly recommend updating this content as soon as possible. Use your own words, or, better, the words that will be most affecting for your congregation. Regardless of the site’s goals (be they providing information or accepting donations) the written content of the site must be given special attention.
The BoldGrid Post and Page Builder makes it easy to edit the starter copy. Once you’re editing a page, you can simply click within a body of text to change what’s written there.
Accepting Donations
As a place of worship, you will likely have volunteers in your community helping out with various fundraisers or charity events. But what about those who have no time but would have rather donate treasure?
Having a website built on WordPress means you can easily augment your site with a payment gateway for accepting donations. The Give plugin is highly popular among WordPress users, but you can search the WordPress plugin repository for something that works best for you.
Once you’ve selected a plugin, it’s incredibly easy to install it and be on your way.
Choosing High-Quality Image
Do you have images you’d like to use on your site? If so, that’s great, you can use those images by uploading them to your Media Library.
It’s always best to—whenever possible—use high-quality images taken by a professional photographer. This makes your site look more professional. However, images of this higher quality are not always readily available. And there are copyright issues to consider. This is why BoldGrid’s image search tool comes pre-installed.
Image Search
If you don’t have any professional images, you can always search for some using BoldGrid Connect search. This is a search tool built right into your WordPress Media Library which scans photo databases all over the web to get you high-quality images that are marked for legal copying.
If your budget allows for it, you can even purchase premium images using your BoldGrid coin budget.
Customizing Your Site
It’s time to customize your site. This is the fun part.
There are several points of entry for the Customizer. For example, after going through your Inspirations process, you can enter the Customizer by clicking the available button. This is a guided approach.
For self-guidance, you can also enter the Customizer at any point by clicking the button in your toolbar or from the admin area.
Colors, Fonts, and More
From within the Customizer, you can control virtually every visual element of your site from the title and tagline to colors, fonts, and menus. Be sure to visit the full Customizer guide to learn more about the options. Or, you can jump right in and start pressing buttons and sliding sliders.
Beyond the Customizer
Yes, you can proceed past the options available to you in the Customizer, but at that point it would be best to consult with a WordPress theme developer.
WordPress theme development is a highly popular field, and there are developers all over the world familiar with the WordPress theme framework, so you should have no trouble finding someone to help.
When Is Your Site Ready To Launch?
It can be difficult to determine when your site is ready for the world. But there’s no need to worry. Once your site is live, you can build a whole new site using your staging area. So you can always be developing a newer, better version or your site in the background.
And, as always, be sure to let us know if you have any questions or comments be sure to leave us a comment or check in with our hosting experts anytime.
