Is an affordable website destined to be ugly?

Is spending thousands of dollars necessary for a website that both communicate clearly and is attractive to users? Absolutely not is the answer to both of these questions. Yes, you could spend thousands and achieve a beautiful and effective website, or you could go the affordable route and end up with something displeasing and ineffective. But, one of the beautiful things about the day and age we live in is the access to website building platforms that are both affordable and effective. You have probably heard of some if not most of them: Squarespace, Wix, WordPress as well as a handful of church focused platforms like Cloversites and Nucleus. All of these, are options for you and your church. Feel free to click on each of the names and explore the home page of each of these platforms, and scroll through this article to see what other non-mega churches are using for their excellent websites, click here (thanks goes to Abundant Church Websites for this helpful article).

 We believe that Squarespace offers the best package for the normative sized church along with its normative sized budget.

In our opinion, we believe that each of these has their strengths, however, we believe that Squarespace offers the best package for the normative sized church along with its normative sized budget (which neither are anything to be ashamed of). There are a few reasons for this, which we will discuss below. From this point on I will use SS as shorthand for Squarespace.

1.     Simplicity – both in its visual presentation and in its usability. Simple is good, the more complicated a website is, the more ineffective they are. The website’s main job is to communicate to the viewers, as the message becomes jumbled up or increasingly more difficult to find, you lose the attention of your viewers. You have a very short time to catch and keep attention when it comes to websites, some studies have shown less than 1 sec. Complexity drastically increases the time needed to understand what is being communicated. Beyond the visual communication, the behind-the-scenes interface used to edit, update, and create the website is incredibly easy to use. (Be on the look-out for how-to videos that we will be producing, as well as numerous other videos already on YouTube.)

2.     Cost – The cost for a website produced using SS will be $26 dollars a month or $216 annually for your website plus a once a year domain name fee, which varies a bit based on the value of domain (most .coms are $20 a year). If you already own your domain through a domain service like ‘GoDaddy’ you can transition it to a SS site relatively easily and maintain your payments with your domain provider.

3.     Curation – the themes that are usable through SS have been developed and designed in house by SS. Ensuring all themes and available functions are backed by SS themselves. Why does this matter? Well, when using a platform like WordPress, the themes and widgets or functions that are developed and available are open-sourced. Meaning its open for all developers to add to the pool of available resources to use within your website. While adding to the creative possibilities of WordPress sites, you have to become educated in understanding if the product will work or not, because they are not backed by the platform. Now SS may seem like it lacks the creative possibilities due to this curation, but these creative functions often add complexities and headaches for those building and maintaining the website.

4.     Design – Let’s face it, not all of us have the creative eye. Or an eye that recognizes and understands design. With SS it allows even the most design-challenged individuals to not fear creating an ugly duckling in the pond of church websites. Each theme is ready to go from the beginning, and if you are looking to change different elements themes allow for creative expressions, without jeopardizing the site as a whole. For some this may feel constricting, however, for most churches it provides more than enough room to make it their own. If your creative bug is still biting, custom coding can be imputed for extra functions, you can see these in the larger churches SS designs.

5.     Integration – Because of the ability to add code, it allows for several different church software plugins, like planning center’s giving platform. On top of all this, SS integrates seamlessly into Google Suit. Meaning, your emails can be hosted by Gmail, as well as having website form submissions to be sent to your Google Drive (On top of this, Google offers the GSuite to non-profits for free, through Techsoup). And if mass emails are your thing, Mailchimp also has built-in integration.

 Your church can have a great website, for less than $250 a year, through SS. Still unsure about it? Or want to see a church website built by us on SS? Check out this church website. 

If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to us here, or through email here.