In yesterday’s ramblings, I talked about what I would consider the purposes of a church website. Now, we can talk about rather or not a website is serving it’s intended purpose. How do you know?

Take A Look Inside
Well, once you define the purpose, some of the measuring is easy to do. For instance, the content question…if your church has a purpose of giving people relevant content and pointing them to Christ just take a look at your pages. How many pages offer teachings, lessons & encouragement? Or point somewhere that does? Don’t feel anxious to churn out articles and pages of lessons for your site. You don’t have to generate your own content these days. Pointing to other websites is not shameful in the slightest!!! Just make sure you trust the sites you are using.

Take a Look Around
Comparison is also a very helpful tool. Look at people doing things well to get ideas on improvement of your own process. Collaboration is the way of the web.

A few good sites:
Grace Baptist Church
On this site, relevant content is linked directly from the homepage in the form of their Podcast link. News and announcements are scrolling for all the world to see, again right on the home page.

Table Rock Fellowship Church
This is a super simple front page, but it’s got the necessary elements very easy to find.

I won’t bother to post the tons of really great (and not so great) church websites online. A Google search of “Great Church Websites” will get you a plethora of sites to review. And once you’ve seen a few of those…Google some of your neighbor or sister churches to see their websites. You will notice a number of differences between sites that look really clean, sleek and professional and those that look homegrown. That’s not to suggest that homegrown is bad, homegrown is often free and free ain’t that bad, lol…but it pays to note the vast range of possibilities in websites. And again, you’ll want to look back at your purpose to determine how important it is to your church to have a snazzy site.

Honestly, beautiful design isn’t everything (although I’m a big fan of beautiful design) and craigslist alone proves that a site need not look great to be uber-useful. Your site needs to meet the purpose and keep fresh content coming. Your people WILL come back. But keep in mind that a very attractive site will go a long way in holding the interest of people that aren’t already interested. Look at your site through the eyes of a person who might be moving across the country and doesn’t yet know anybody or anything about which church to pick. A good site might help make those first impressions more impressionable.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll delve into site components and potential costs.