Managing your own content.
Have you ever run across a church website that has a feature, page or announcement about an upcoming church function that was over and done months or even years ago? It is painful to see, and yet I see it all the time. I understand how it happens, how a web site gets orphaned like that… people come and people go, or lose interest, or so much time lapses between updates that people simply forget how to make the changes, and it seems like they are re-inventing the wheel every time they try.
Perhaps, also, the website never became the point of reference for the day-to-day activities of the church that everyone hoped it would. It is a “vicious circle”, if the website does not quickly become this active, current, reference for “all things going on at church”, church members have no reason or desire to add it to their daily routine. Interest in maintaining the website quickly wanes and there it sits.
Things have also changed in the way that major search engines evaluate and rank websites. There are many aspects to this, but one thing that is now evaluated is the overall activity of the website. If a website has not changed in weeks or months it is not “seen” by the search engine as “current”. It assumes that the information on the site is potentially outdated and ranks it lower than a nearly identical site that has content being added and deleted on a continual basis.
Every GospelHaus Partnership website is built upon the foundation of our fast, flexible, easy-to-use content management system or “CMS”. Our desire is to offer a powerful, yet very simple to use CMS that enables even non-technical users to edit, update and add content to websites. Our user-friendly CMS is completely browser-based so no special software is required. Log in and add content from any computer with an internet connection. Create a new page, enter your text (or simply copy and paste), add images, links, audio or documents into the system directly from the web browser and the software automatically adds the new page to your site.
Let me provide an simple example of why a CMS is clearly a better way to add content to your site. Suppose you write an “article” about a missions conference coming up in a couple of months, but you don’t want it to appear on the website until the conference is just one month away. You predetermine the date an article is published and automatically appears on your website and just as important, you predetermine when the article reverts to a “draft” version and automatically unpublishes itself, thus removing the page from the website. No more having to hear, “Hey Pastor, that page is still up on the website about last months conference.”