Every church needs a website. Period. This is pretty much established gospel among most in positions of church leadership. How big a site, how it should look, what it should do… now those all are up for debate. And those answers will vary from church to church; some basically just need the ‘brochure site’, while some would flourish with extensive setups that truly bring their church life onto the Web.
Wherever in that spectrum a given church lies, though, there’s always the risk that the site will fail. It’s often an insidiously gradual thing, too – the site goes a week without updating, then two weeks, then a month… and eventually your site shows listings from events in 2006. And the church’s members probably don’t notice, because they aren’t paying attention to it – which is why it failed in the first place.
You know who does notice, though? The new couple who moves in nearby and hits up Google for area churches. If your church has a website, it can often appear as a direct link right there by a map Google generates with pushpins representing churches:
Now, here’s the rhetorical question: if your site looks like crap and hasn’t been updated since Clinton was in office, would that give a prospective member the warm + fuzzies about your church?
It’s not that people demand something shiny and web2.0ish – it’s just that they expect a certain “care” factor. It is absolutely no different than how a prospective member will evaluate your church plant; if it looks like crap and no one really cares, they’re gonna go elsewhere.
So you need a website and you don’t want it to end up like your ‘vegetable garden’ that fed a huge pile of weeds last summer – that’s clear. But how do you ensure that your website project produces a website that serves both prospective and current members equally as well? Obviously I’m leading up to something, and here’s what it is: The 5 Absolutely Critical Things That Will Make Or Break Your Church Website.
Part 1? Well, I just typed all this intro stuff and my fingers are cramping, so you’ll have to wait til tomorrow… but here’s a hint: you don’t build a dog house if you don’t have a dog. Chew on that for a while… 