At my former church, I spent a couple of years as a volunteer building and making improvements to their website. (I was also involved in the CE program there too). At the request of the pastor, I took it over from a volunteer who I had actually seen sitting in front of the church’s computer with an HTML MANUAL to create the church site. Needless to say, it was NOT good.

In its place, I put something better. Not fancy, just respectable and loaded with great photos and regularly refresh content. Then after doing the site myself for about three years, we gathered a committee and spent about 10 months working as a team. We had a lot of great discussion and ideas, and implemented some great changes and features. I really enjoyed the people on that team. The site was still rather modestly designed, but it kept getting better. Even had a message board where committees could post their notes to each other.  

Then I decided to move on from that church. And about 4 months later I visited the site and saw that someone there had basically nuked the site. And its place they put a circa 1996 style website.

You can see a screenshot of the “new” site here at the right>

It has looked bad for the last 7 months, and what’s weird is they didn’t need to nuke what was up there. It was all in HTML and easily editable. They took it all down and put up new pages, all of which look pretty much as bad as this page on the right looks.  The only nice thing is the graphic, which was part of the old site. Lately they have added some text to the main page, but it’s formatted wrong and looks odd on the page, as does pretty much everything else, –which is the tip-off that whoever is doing it, doesn’t quite know how. They’re still promising to post pdfs of the newsletter going on 7 months now. All of this which is to say “Imagine what this says to visitors? …let alone the members.”

They really should not have nuked the previous site until they had a new site ready. But I digress…

The first lesson I learned is “you can’t control what you can’t control.” Work as you may on the church site, but eventually someone else will take it over, whether you retire, move on, or hand it over.  I’m left shaking my head, and probably so are a couple of members still there. In retrospect, I should have identified volunteers web talent to work on the site with me, –and not just good people with good ideas. That’s the thing about website development… the team needs to include people who actually know how to put something up that’s respectable.  

The second lesson is I should have believed what people had been telling me from other churches and not assumed it wouldn’t happen to me. For years I’ve been hearing church website horror stories from other pastors and church web techies. – Web work that gets nuked or disfigured by some volunteer, and the staff or other leaders don’t know what to do about it, don’t know if the original files still exist, or just hope it will get better, (or don’t care). Or sites that get built in complex code by some company or super-webtechie, and the next volunteer doesn’t know how to work with it, so they must nuke it.

I should have forseen this, but by the time we decided to leave that congregation, it was too late to do what I should have done a year before. Again… I should have worked harder with the staff and volunteers at my former church to understand the “basics” of good church website design. I should have helped them identify WHO in the congregation knew a thing or two about creating a good site. 

The Third Lesson I’ve learned is that many churches have ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER regarding their website. Staff and committees will SAY they want something, and will encourage you to work on the site because YOU want to, and they may even sing your praises, –but after a while they will lose interest. Then if YOU lose interest, it may very well fall apart. (I’m talking about all sorts of projects and great ideas, not just websites here.) It’s one of the reasons I recommend building MODEST sites.  I’ve heard this same thing from other church techies that I’ve come up with the following guidelines which I wish I would have heeded myself!

Guidelines:

1:  Know Thyself. If you are your church’s web techie, then the site will likely be only as good as YOU want to make it, with maybe some help from a few others. After the initial groundswell of support and praise, don’t expect a continuing stream of new info and photos. Plan on getting those yourself. If you are the volunteer who said you’d build it, but don’t have the commitment or time to continue to update it …stop now and reconsider what you’re going to build them.

2:  Work in Moderation.  Just because you CAN do cool stuff doesn’t mean people will embrace it with anything more than “that’s cool.”  We set up some cool stuff on my former church’s site, and got the initial “wow, neat” comments… then nothing. Advice: Just because you HAVE lots of time to build whatever, don’t over do it if it’s not that important to them. PACE yourself so that you can provide the site for the LONG HAUL.

3:  Recognize what year this is. We are still YEARS away from seeing the average church embrace the idea of connecting with each other via the web and using the church site to help the ministry of the church (instead of just advertise it).  Get in for the long haul and even though you can BUILD Rome in a day, don’t expect the Romans to want to live there quite yet. 

I hope some of my story and insights will help your own.

<>< Neil 

Read my article on How to build a better church website:  http://www.sundaysoftware.com/webpage.htm