Everything that's included, in plain terms

The first build

When you get in touch, we start with a conversation, not a form to fill in alone. What are your service times? What's coming up? Who's the site for — regular congregation, or people who've never set foot inside before? That conversation is what the site gets built around.

A standard build includes:

• A home page written from what you've told me, not filler text with your church's name pasted over the top
• A contact form and thank-you page
• Service times and the regular pattern of worship, kept prominent and easy to find
• A what's-on or events section for anything coming up
• Safeguarding contact details — your DSA and Parish Safeguarding Officer, visible from the front page — plus a dedicated safeguarding page with your policy laid out clearly
• Fraud-awareness signposting, pointing your congregation towards Action Fraud so they know where to turn if something looks like a scam
• A privacy policy and cookie policy
• Whatever else matters to your church — a history page, a "how to find us" page with directions, a giving page. We agree the full list together before I start building

Safeguarding and fraud awareness are treated as core to every build, and kept current as guidance changes. See Safeguarding & Online Safety for the full detail.

For a group of parishes sharing one site, this looks a little different — see Groups & Benefices for how that's structured.

What's deliberately left out

I don't build online shops, ecommerce, or take payments directly through the site. If your church already uses a giving platform — the Parish Giving Scheme, or something similar — I'll add a clear link through to it, but the payment happens on their platform. I also don't add member-management systems or livestreaming players; if you already use a service for either, I'll link out to it rather than rebuild it.

This is a deliberate choice, not a gap. A church website's job is simple: let people find out what you're about, when things happen, and how to get in touch. Everything here is built around doing that well.

Hosting

Once your site is built, it's hosted at no cost to your church. There's no separate hosting bill, no renewal notice to worry about, and no technical account to manage yourself. If you need a domain name registering, that's handled as part of getting started too.

Ongoing updates

This is where a church website usually goes wrong elsewhere: it gets built once, looks good for a month, and quietly goes stale because nobody has time to keep it updated. That's the whole reason this service works the way it does — every update after launch is done by me, personally, on a weekly round, at no cost to your church.

That's a big enough part of the service that it has its own page — see Keeping Your Site Current for exactly how sending an update works.