Here at Church Pages, we know the importance of being wise in where you find your resources, as time and money can be limited! 

From our experience working with churches and building websites, we've pulled together our favourite free online resources, which will help your online presence. These cover everything from images to blogs around how to manage your social media. 

Obviously we can't also add our own blog & Twitter into the list (we're biased!) however, if you would like any support, do not hesitate to get in touch with the team.

1. Unsplash - free images from phenomenal photographers

Unsplash is an online bank of "beautiful, free photos. Gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers."

With a comprehensive search and global pool of photographers, we find Unsplash invaluable for the work we do with churches, when church-specific photos are not available. We use Unsplash within many of the Church Pages Design templates, just to show you how effective they can be! 

Even if you have a bank of images already, it can be useful to look on Unsplash, just for some free inspiration from some of the world's best photographers.

Here are some of the Unsplash photos in action: 

2. Crowdfire - manage multiple social media 

Crowdfire is an app which analyses multiple social media platforms and ties these together, to help you manage all your various accounts. If you're anything like us, you'll have a few accounts which you are looking after, and it's helpful to have a side-kick to watch these for you, and suggest when to post, and sometimes even what to post!

3. Church Marketing Sucks - great blog and online resources

This may seem like an offensive title however, this website can be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has struggled with church marketing, or even looking at how to welcome more people into your church. With an honest, pragmatic approach, this team seeks to educate and motivate churches to present the gospel in it's truest form.

Some of our favourite resources from CMS are:

• Social Media Graphics: They provide an array of images or ideas of how to talk about upcoming events or dates.
• Church Visitors: How to welcome people into your church
• Church Communicator Burnout: What this is and how to manage this?

4. The Bible Project - Bible 101 and general graphic-greatness

The Bible Project is a crowdfunded project to document the Bible in video and graphic-form, to help people engage with the Bible as one meaningful story of God's redemption. This team now provides videos of every book of the Bible along with key themes, and a podcast which explains the making and questions behind each video. 

For church workers, this is a wealth of wisdom for your personal life and an education in how to successfully communicate big ideas. We all know the feeling of having to convey a large concept and these guys do this every step of the way. So, if nothing else, The Bible Project is worth checking out for their sheer communication-genius and ability to engage people of all ages with a highly historical text.

5. Snapseed - create those all important images-with-text for social media

When you manage a visual social-media platform such as Instagram or Snapchat, it's these places where it can be important to inject scripture or key themes from your sermon series. The Snapseed app can be super helpful for this, as it gives you the ability to overlay text onto images - and create a beautiful professional look, in a fraction of the time compared to traditional visual editing methods. 

We use the Snapseed app on some of the social media accounts we manage for Khooseller, and occasionally on the Church Pages Twitter!

Can we help further?

So, we hope that list was helpful. If you know of any other free or reasonably priced resources, do comment below, and don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to speak to one of the team about how we could support you online.