Plain notes for the people who keep the website.
Short, useful entries on church websites, domains, email, the radio, and owning your own data — written for pastors and the volunteers who inherited the login. Read one, print it, hand it to the next person.
All entries
RSS feedThe week the volunteer who built the site moves away.
Most churches don’t lose their website to a hacker — they lose it to a moving truck and one login in one person’s inbox. The five keys a church website hangs on, who should hold each, the one-afternoon handover to do while your volunteer is still here, the recovery order if they’re already gone, and why the keys belong in the church’s name.
Back up the church website the way you back up the checkbook.
The prayer list, the directory, ten years of Sunday recordings — that is a set of church records, and most churches have never made a copy. What the website folder is made of, the four parts that change, the treasurer’s first-Monday routine applied to it, where the copy lives, a restore drill twice a year, and the one page to write down for whoever comes after you.
A radio station that only plays your preaching (and how to run one from a folder of MP3s).
Most churches already have the recordings and nowhere to put them but Facebook or YouTube. What a homepage station actually is, how a whole service gets sliced into leveled, tagged clips, how to do it by hand on a laptop if your host can't, the four things to cut before it goes public, and a Monday routine that takes ten minutes.
What a church website actually needs on the home page (and the four things it doesn't).
A stranger opens your home page with three questions: when, where, and what will it be like. The five things that belong on the first screen, the twelve the whole page needs, the four most church sites should take off, and a print-out to walk your own home page against on a phone.
What your church website tells strangers about your members (and how to check in ten minutes).
Most church websites call other companies every time a page loads — fonts, video, maps, analytics. Each call hands over the visitor's address and the page they're on. Why that matters most on the prayer-request page, how to see it on your own site with the browser you already have, and six questions to ask your provider.
Moving your church website without losing your domain (or your email).
Nine things to settle before the website changes hands: who actually owns the domain, the email records that break silently, why not to transfer the name the same week, lowering TTL, redirects, backups, and the morning-after walk-around. Print-friendly.
The Journal grows one honest note at a time — no schedule promised, no filler. Nothing is on the bench right now: the next entries will follow the product rather than run ahead of it. When there is something worth writing down for the people who keep a church’s website, it will be here, and in the feed.
Follow without signing up for anything.
Paste the feed address into any reader — Feedly, NetNewsWire, Thunderbird, your phone's news app. No account, no newsletter, nothing counted.
https://faithkit.org/blog/feed.xml
The website these notes are about.
FaithKit is a church website you own outright — free to install yourself, or done for you by MattCreates. The sample church is a sample; poke around the admin with the password cornerstone.