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I’m in the midst of thinking about church websites. I started, as many pastors do, by looking at what I think are “better” church websites. What I find are a lot of sites that look the same:
- You have the static, old HTML format pages that are out-of-date, not relatable, and …well… ancient. No thanks.
- You have the cookie-cutter sites from E-zekiel or some other company that are obvious from a mile away, are unintuitive, have back-end management systems that are either so complicated that staff job descriptions should require programming languages or are so watered down that you can’t implement mainstream apps like google and youtube, well, enough said, No thanks.
- Or you have, what I’ll call, the next-wave church website. They are much better. They are visually stimulating and are setup for more dynamic content and they are far less expensive than they used to be. But they still all look much like one another… they are still trapped in this mindset of “come to us,” and they still tend to be ‘information-based’ instead of relational.
These websites have come a long way, but I feel like even the best of them are still running behind corporate websites saying, “We want to be like you. Wait up!”
What is it we need for the church of this millennium? What is the right answer for us?
In my blog I have already been shouting (in fact, I’m blue in the face) that we need dynamic, relational content on our sites…but I’ve, sadly, always been thinking of the existing model of church website with ‘dynamic’ content and more relational content in an existing structure.
This week I’ve been thinking that this is altogether the wrong concept.
Right now, the typical church website tends to have information about itself, some stories about upcoming events (all of this in a depressingly informational style), a calendar, a link to sermons / bulletins, and the *ALL-IMPORTANT* newsletter. Hmmm, Church websites, then, are taking a variety of things we already and making their proprietary website a forum for distributing them.
Why are we letting a gutenberg-based (500 year old technology) medium, for instance, dictate how we do church communications? Why all the disjunct technologies and modes put together in such a contrived fashion??? How do we think completely out-of-the-box to redefine how our church communicates both on-line and internally?
I have a couple of thoughts, but, to be fair, I need to work on them here in Normal before I say anymore here online! Put on your thinking caps and let’s get outside of the box. Let’s transform church communications.
Here is to Creative and Effective Communicating!
Why don’t you list some examples of what you see are more relational websites (not necessarily church ones). I also have spent much time looking at church websites and think most of them are simply awful (and mine is one of them: http://www.thekrumchurch.com). However, we do get a fair amount of traffic to it because we have an in-house day care and people do want the information about that.
I admit I personally don’t want a “relational” website–I go to them for information. However, I am older, and although an early adapter of all things electronic, I am not a native of that communication environment.