Adding Audio Sermons to a Church Website

Adding sermons to your church website serves several purposes. First, the sermons allow potential visitors to find out a little better what your church is like, by listening to a sermon on your church website before they visit. Online sermons are also useful for those members who have conflicting work schedules, but want to hear the sermon from the service they missed. Online sermons are also beneficial to those members who are sick or who are shut-ins, allowing them to also hear the sermon for the week, even when they are not present.

Online sermons can also have an impact far outside of our immediate geographical area. An online sermon allows missionaries you support or have contact with around the world to hear your messages, and be encouraged by them from where ever they are in the world. Online sermons also allow members that have moved away to keep in touch with your church by listening from time to time.

If you already have a church website, you can add a page to the website just for your sermons. If you are using Wordpress for your church website, which I recommend strongly, you can simply add a new category under "Posts" and put your sermons in that category. Make a link to the category on your main page.

With Wordpress, all you need is a simple, free plug in to add your sermons to the website called "Audio Player". Once this Wordpress plug in is installed (follow the instructions carefully), you can upload and add your audio sermon to the website with just a few clicks. Go to "Add New Post", and after entering a title and any information you want to add, click the Add Audio" button at the top of the editor box (see sidebar). Find the audio file on your computer, click it, and it will upload. Depending on the size of the file, this may take some time. Once it is done, click "Audio Player" then "Insert into Post", as you see below.

This is what you're audio player will look like, though you can customize it to match the colors of your church website's Wordpress theme:

But, what if we don't use Wordpress for our church website?

Not a problem. There are a few options open for you. The simplest solution is to upload the sermons via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). I prefer to use FireFTP, a Firefox Add On, though there are many different kinds of FTP Software available. If your web host uses CPanel, you can also upload using the File Manager

Begin by creating a directory (or folder) on your web site's server called "Sermons", where you can upload all of your sermons too. Click on that directory in the FTP software or File Manager and upload the sermon from your computer's hard drive.

Next, add a link to the sermon from your web page. You can do this by writing the title of the sermon, and linking to the exact file (for example: <a href="http://www.yourchurchwebsite.com/sermons/todayssermon.mp3">Today's Sermon</a>). When someone clicks on the link, their default audio plug in will open up and play the audio. Visitors will also be able to download it by right clicking on the link and selecting "Save link as..." or "Save target as..." so they can add it to their own MP3 player for later.

Let's back up a little bit. Before you can upload your sermons to your church's website, you'll need to make sure they are in a format that people can listen to. MP3 is the preferred format because it is a compressed (smaller) file, and has reasonably good quality. Most people can listen to MP3's on their computers too.

Depending on how your church's sound system is set up, you will need some way to get the sermon file onto your computer so you can edit it and upload it. Our church's sound system stores all audio files onto a Flash Card, which I am able to remove and insert into a removable USB Flash Card Reader for my laptop. From there, I copy the sermon audio files onto my hard drive so I can start to edit the sermons.

Our sound system records sermons as mp3 files, but it labels them "1001" "1002" etc. My first step is to rename the file something unique and logical. I use the sermon date and time to name the file, usually something like oct62010pm.mp3. This allows me, at a glance, to be able to later remove old sermon files from the web site to make room for new ones. I usually remove a month's worth of sermons every six months, and naming the sermon files with the date allows me to do this more efficiently.

I also edit the ID3 tags of the mp3 file. Have you ever loaded an mp3 file onto your mp3 player, only to have it come up named "track 1" (or something equally non-descriptive)? ID3 tags provide the title of tracks, the genre, the artist, and other things, so that every track (Sermon) has a proper title.

You can edit ID3 tags for sermons (and other audio files) using software such as iTunes. If you click on your sermon file, it will open up in iTunes (if that is your default audio player). Right click on the sermon in iTunes, and select "Get Info". A pop up window will open up. Click on the second tag, "Info", and fill in as much information as you can about the Sermon you are editing. This information will display on an MP3 player or on the embedded audio player on the church website.

There are a few things you may want to consider before you start to add sermons to your church website.

1. Your Web Hosting Bandwidth

Your website is "hosted" with a web host that it rents server space from. Web hosting is usually a fee you pay every month or every six months (maybe even annually). This web host has certain restrictions on your web site plan, such as how much memory you can store on their server total, and how much bandwidth you can use each month.

Bandwidth is the size of the file transfer you have each month. Every time someone visits your website, your images, HTML files, and other files on your website are accessed, and the size of each of those files adds up towards the total bandwidth you use each month. Most of the time you will not come close to using up your bandwidth, but as soon as you start adding larger files such as audio and video files, you may begin to see your bandwidth usage get close to your limits. You will need to make sure that your web hosting has generous bandwidth allotments with your plan. Some web hosts, such as Hostgator, have unlimited bandwidth now.

2. Disk Space

Your web hosting "disk space" refers to the amount of memory you are allowed on your web host's servers. As with Bandwidth, this can add up once you start to add audio and video files to your church website.

You should decide how long you are going to leave your sermons online before taking them down, so as to conserve disk space with your web host. For our church's website, we take down sermons every six months. I usually delete an entire month's worth of sermons at once. I do usually leave special services up longer, such as messages from our annual revival meetings and missions' conference. These I take down after the next revival meetings or missions conference sermons go up on the website.

Once you have begun adding sermons to your church website, you may want to consider taking the next step: creating a sermons' podcast for your church.

What is a podcast? The easiest way to describe a podcast is to say that a podcast is an on-demand radio show which people can subscribe to using a program such as iTunes. If you go into the iTunes store, and click on "podcasts" you will see free audio programs on a variety of topics, from news programs, learning programs, to sermon podcasts.

In order to make your sermon archive into a podcast, you will need to create an RSS feed for your sermons on your church website. If you are already using  a platform such as Wordpress, an RSS feed is probably already being generated for your website. Otherwise, you may need to create an RSS feed that follows the requirements of iTunes, and other audio programs. iTunes has written up some handy guidelines here, which are too detailed to cover in this brief hub (this link leads to an example feed). Suffice it to say, using a program such as Wordpress, which automatically generates the RSS feed for you, makes life much easier for the church website manager.

Web design is one of those fields which is continually changing. As technology and tools change, you'll need to grow with it. Do you have any tools you like to use for managing your church's sermons on the church website? Let me know in the comments section. Thanks!