AWA -- Why Do Church Websites Go Bad?

Why Do Church Websites Go Bad?


Church websites are a lot like a city mass transit system
	I used to live in Toronto where millions of people ride the buses and subways of the huge sprawling city. Walk out to the street just as a bus pulls away. No problem, because glancing down the street you can see the next bus cresting a hill not too far away. Imagine a large city without any buses. Everybody drives their cars or their bicycles (like a church without a website). The city fathers decide they need to get a mass transit system going. Before too long you can catch a bus or city van on the major streets every two or three hours and on the not quite so major streets about once a day, if you are lucky. Six months later, because so few people were using the system, they sold off some of the buses. Perhaps you get my drift by now, of where this website is headed. A website brimming full and up to date with what people are looking for will become very popular. That popularity will inspire it to grow and become even more successful (like Toronto's mass transit system). Most of the time, the church and it's website never get past that point of critical mass where it finally takes on an enthusiastic energy of it's own. And so these sites do not get updated because they rarely get visited. These sites rarely get visited because they are stale and out of date and never did offer much anyway.
A surprisingly high percentage of church websites are in very bad shape, many of them appear to have been abandoned. Why?
Webmaster Gave Up	A lot of church webmasters simply give up. Here are some examples that I have heard from webmasters: - The site was uploaded a year ago and the hit counter on the home page only reads 12. - I put an announcement in the bulletin six months ago asking for information for the website and so far nobody has called. - The church office is supposed to keep the information management system up to date, but it's such a hassle and besides, hardly anybody uses the website. Deliver a speech, play a musical instrument, sing in the choir. The audience responds, a hearty amen, applause. You rub shoulders with people. You are part of the action. It can be inspiring. Build a website and you don't get to chat with the visitors, you don't get that audience response, it's not like singing in the choir. It's like operating a CB radio with the transmitter MAXed out to a big antenna, but the receiver never did work. After awhile, a lot of webmasters simple give up because the perceive that nobody cares. Very often it is a perception problem, that the website is a big waste of time.
Team Needed	It is a common misconception that a computer expert or someone with a degree in computer science is the ideal person to build a church website. This is all too often far from the truth. Making a good website requires a range of skills including artistic design and technical abilities. Few people have both, which is why there are so many ugly church websites. If you don’t have someone with a flair for artistic design to work alongside your technical people then you may well end up with an ugly looking website.
Other Solutions	We can find many of the solutions to these problems by reviewing the "Meet The Webmasters" pages featured on this website. These are the webmasters and web teams who built the websites that have been winning the eChurch awards. Lets look for some success stories: - Bill Aumack, webmaster for the Downey Adventist Church is persistent with church members to get the information that he needs. Persistence gradually pays off and the flow of information builds and becomes somewhat more automatic. His news letter on Promoting Your Website offers a lot of great ideas for promoting a website into a success story. A popular website does tend to breed success on into the future. - The Norwalk Adventist Church website is a team effort, which is an excellent idea. Will Baron is the team leader, making no claim to web mastering expertise. This kind of a team stands a much better chance at success than when a church simply nominates a member who is rumored to know something about HTML coding. - The San Francisco Central Church, Sacramento Central, the Jamaica Adventist Church and the Sunnyvale Adventist Church are some of the other excellent examples of making the church website a team project. - The church office team should have as one of their stated priorities getting information to the webmaster. - A related approach is what the Pioneer Memorial Church webmaster did with SimpleUpdates, to make it possible for the office staff and church leaders to directly help keep content up-to-date. - Many church websites become more successful because one or more members take the initiative to encourage the webmaster or the web team or step forward to be the information gathering agent. You don't have to know anything about website design to become a key ingredient for a successful website. - The pastor, the church board, the leaders need to communicate that the church website really is important. Make that clear to your website team, make that clear to the leaders who need to facilitate the flow of up-to-date information to the website. - The website should also encourage visitors to contact the church and to contact the webmaster. Sad to say, this needs to be done in a way that is not wide open to the SPAMers who plague our email.