Were thrilled to announcethat this summer churches will be able to use their A Church Near You pages astheir website for FREE. The new functionality includes:
- The ability to point your domain name (the URL/web address of your site) to your ACNY page. This means you can stop paying the fee charged by your website host and/or designer. They estimate that this will save Church of England churches 1 million nationally. When they launch, there will be a step-by-step guide to help editors make this change.
- An opportunity to add news stories and notice sheets to your pages, allowing you to promote upcoming events, good news stories from your church and notices.
- The gallery will be back by popular demand! This will be capped at 20 images to ensure that these photos are kept up-to-date.
- Greater customisation choices from the ability to select the branding of national campaigns for your page to which news stories and events will appear on your church's homepage.
- Analytic information will be visible to editors on the homepage when logged in showing you how many people have visited your page this week, month and year.
All of this will be available by September 2018, so if yourethinking about updating your website, do look at the functionality ACNY willsoon be able to offer you.
Tags on A Church Near You- tell us what you think
As the national team constantly work to improve A Church Near You, they're reviewing the tags onthe site. Tags are the terms users can search for to find events, services andthe facilities your church offers, such as a car park, accessible toilet ornativity service. Thanks to editor feedback, they've already made some changes tothe tags available to use. They will also be surveying users to ensure they'veincluded tags for the kind of things they might search for. Remember, ACNY'sprimary focus is to encourage those outside of the Church into relationshipwith a local church. They have to ensure these tags work for them.
Please take a short survey here - it should onlytake five minutes.
