Greetings!
November 30, 2007
Greetings, Portraits of Mission Strategies class!
I’m not really concerned that you all figure out how to get on this blog and all post. For those of you who are bloggers, however, it would be nice to see you post some of your findings. The easiest way will be simply to add a “Comment.” Please include a web link and some very brief comments. Do you have a recommended site that you think would be helpful to look at in class? Post it here, and I will check it out.
BTW, I made this blog private. It simply means that it is not being indexed by Google or other search engines. I’ll probably get rid of this in a couple weeks, so don’t worry about something you post here being found by your candidacy committee or preserved for Internet eternity.
http://www.shellschurch.org/ – Home Church
Good points for having the name and address of the church front and center. Even though Christian Computing Magazine advises not to put a picture of your church building on the front page, to use people instead – I kinda like the picture of my home church, because it’s seasonal and it’s not just a random picture… My home church’s website is surprisingly updated!
http://www.lordoflifelutheran.com/home.xml – Internship Church
Not so updated -considering they still have listed bible studies that I ran while on internship there last year… Rick Warren’s Ministry Toolbox includes “Communicate more often, but with less content.” I think when more churches start to take their web-presence seriously, they’ll be able to do this. This website was updated monthly, by a few different people – and then the next month, more would just be added to the list, instead of taking off old information… It was frustrating, when the solution was having one contact person, and just shooting them a quick email when you wanted them to update something.
One of the sites I reviewed was “The Well: Church and Coffeehouse.” The site does not seem to be getting updated very frequently. For example, the “Youth and Childrens Ministry” home page says, “Sunday morning faith formation classes are out for the summer…” Well –it’s not summer any longer. It’s December 5th actually! Many other pages on the site show they were last updated on 08/16/07. That’s better than the Youth and Children’s Ministry page, but it’s still pushing 4 months since updating…
One of the things I found really interesting was the disparity in the church and the quality of the website. The smallest in raw baptized membership, http://www.saintnicholaslutheran.org, has a great website (I admit my bias, but the website I find incredible), but the second to largest, http://www.tree-of-life.us, has an almost useless website.
I seemed to have found three churches which have incorporated the internet as an outreach tool, and one which has yet to realize its capacity to reach people.
Also, the tool is a wonderful item and I plan on sending the evaluation tool and the website links from Mark’s page to the churches I evaluated to show that this is a priority not only in the seminary, but to the culture that we live in. The web is an outreach tool that can reach any person at any time, and I’m not ashamed to admit I am proud that my home congregation is addressing this reality.
You are all noticing the trouble of having outdated web sites. Nothing says obsolete like 2004…
Erin: You highlight an important issue. Should there just be one webmaster, and everyone has to run stuff through that person? Or should everyone have the ability to manage their own content? (If so, can they do it and will they do it?)
With the two church sites you visited, both have a bunch of HTML/formatting/style problems. Can you find them? (page titles, fonts, elements extending beyond the borders…)
Mike: You note the dated stuff on the Well, but they do have a lot of good stuff. Did you check the blogs? And how many church sites have music downloads and poetry and art pages?
Jonathan: I do like the Saint Nicholas site also. Very attractive. (But there is a lot of stuff dated 2004 on it.) The Tree of Life site at least has a very nice calendar.
One of the sites I looked at was http://www.pontonline.org–a church that I did some ministy with during college. I’m pleased to see that they updated their website in some good ways since when I was there. I think it could be user friendly to those not familiar with the congregation…I especially liked the links about “what to wear”, etc. It seems like a silly thing, but it is a practicular concern for people, especially for those who may not have much/any experience with churches.
A second note: As I’ve looked at sites, I’ve been reminded that more stuff isn’t always better. Images are neccisary, but too many can be distracting and make sites difficult to navigate.
It might be because of this busy time of year, but has anyone else found that the calendars on the church websites have normal weekly activities listed on Monday 12/24 and Tuesday 12/25?
That was a big pet peeve I found… I know that not all churches hold Christmas Eve or Christmas Day services (why I won’t speculate on), but so far six websites I browsed didn’t even show the 25th as being Christmas Day.
Is this a widespread occurence on church websites?