Support From The Top
A sure-fire way to make sure your website dies a slow death is do go about it without the buy-in of the guys at the very top. Obviously churches have widely varying authority structures, but it doesn’t matter if it’s one guy or thirteen: if they don’t go along with it, (or worse, are ambivalent about it), you’ve just made sure you’re going to waste a good deal of time building a snowman in a greenhouse.
There’s three main ways the leadership will either drive or kill a project. The first is money. There are costs involved – in hosting, in developing, maybe in software or hardware or training. The guys with the purse strings need to understand this and be prepared to spend money to do this. No money, no site. Nickel-and-diming it is going to accomplish the same thing; like I’ve discussed previously, a cheaply-done, half-baked website is going to be obvious to anyone.
Secondly, the leadership needs to be instrumental in organizing things. There’s a pipeline that needs to be set up to keep content going to the website, and the leadership need to get the right people doing the right things. Providing news, calendars, pictures, whatever – if it’s not available or arriving at the right person too late to matter, you might as well not bother. It’s classic herding cats, but then again, they probably should be used to it – doing ANYTHING in a church is herding cats.
A corollary to this is number 3: the leadership need to cheerlead this. I’ve discussed in #1 about the congregation being your main source of traffic to your site; the leadership need to stand up front and exhort like crazy to keep the people excited about their website. They need to keep motivating those doing all the actual work, helping them keep their eyes on the big prize of creating an evangelism tool that will make a difference. And they need to deal with the skeptics, those who think the website is a cost center or just a stupid idea no one actually visits. Those people can sap the morale of those doing the work faster than chasing a rambunctious two-year-old. They need to pacify them, convince them, or just get them the hell out of the way before those doing the work start asking themselves why they should bother. How? I don’t know, but that’s why I’m not a pastor – I’m just the tech guy 
.
If the congregation doesn’t promote it, the website’s dead. If the leadership isn’t supporting the congregation, the congregation won’t promote it, and the website’s dead. I’ll reveal the next part… um, next time, but here’s a hint: it’s hard to make apple pie if you can’t get any apples.