Do you remember your first date with your significant other? What did you talk about? Did you discuss where your kids will go to school? Did you decide what kind of car you’re going to buy together? Did you pick out curtains and match them to color samples for your future house? Of course not! That would be silly and if that happened to you… I’m sorry, sometimes I get carried away.

First date conversation typically covers a range of topics from favorite style of music to favorite vacation spots. It’s an overhead shot of the other person but isn’t the full understanding.

A church’s website should be the first date, not the wedding.

The typical church website is somewhere between 75-100 pages of content. Most of that content is out of date and/or directed at a specific mission or ministry in the church. In today’s less is more / I want it now world, that just won’t cut it. We can’t just take the church newsletter and turn it into a website. When we do we run into a number of problems:

• there is no one that knows how to maintain it
• content is quickly outdated
• too much content means the important stuff is more difficult to find
• the church website quickly becomes very inwardly focused

The reason that last one is an issue is because church websites get a lot of their traffic from potential visitors and new members. If they can’t find the information they’re looking for quickly, they’re likely to just move on to the next church entirely.

That is why, as I said here, 80% of the content on our new church website is going to be directed towards non-members and visitors and only 20% directed at our current community. In order to do that we have cut down the number of pages on our new church website (launching beginning of May 2010) from 100+ to around 25! That is super exciting for any church communications team!

There are a lot of different missions and ministries that churches support these days and every congregation member has their passion. That’s a good thing! We want people to feel compelled by the Spirit of God to give of their time and talents to further the Kingdom of God. After all, that’s why we’re a church, to Know Jesus and Make Jesus Known. However, as we move into this new era of the first date website, we cut a lot of those specific ministry pages from the website. Churches have started to categorize their missions and ministries and therefore should be thinking about creating pages with broad descriptions based on age group for ministries, and locations (local and global) for missions. Churches should still provide information about what they are doing to further the Kingdom of God, and there are ways to do that without picking out curtains too early.

So now you might be wondering where the congregation member is to find the curtain sample wall if it’s not on the website. That’s a great question and of course I’ve got an answer to match. Now keep in mind that this is just one of many possible answers to this all important question. This is what we are planning at Our Saviour’s and is only meant as a suggestion to get your creative juices flowing.

Once you actually step foot in the door there are kiosks and welcome desks with friendly people standing by to answer questions. We are developing a catalog of all our missions and ministries that are offered. It will have more specifics and also who on staff should be contacted if you wanted to get involved.

As you can see, the church website has really become just a commercial for the product. Once you buy the product (visit on a Sunday) and start to become a part of the community, more doors will open up to you and you will be able to get involved in whichever mission or ministry you feel God is calling you to.

Is your church’s website the first date or the wedding? Are you thinking about a re-vamp anytime soon?

[Image by: maricci]

As some of you may know. Our Saviour’s is going to be getting a new website in the first half of May 2010. I’ve tweeted about this and talked about it quite a bit within my church’s community. It is no secret. The part I find weird is that nobody is asking me about it (aside from staff of course). Interestingly enough… I have received a couple of emails from other churches in the nearby area asking who did our website and what we have learned. They no doubt are talking about our current website, since the live URL of our new one is a closely guarded secret!

In an attempt to help any other churches that are looking to redo their church website I have compiled a list of resources that we at Our Saviour’s took into consideration when making the decision on who to go with for our new church website. I like to help direct people into a new way of thinking when it comes to online communication for churches. With our new website we have decided to go with an 80% outward focus and a 20% inward focus approach.

By that I mean that 80% of the content on our new website is going to be directed at people that are not already a part of the Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church community. This means that the pages describing the different missions and ministries we offer will only have what we call timeless copy on them. That means that in 3 months and even a year from now, that page shouldn’t need updating. This helps us so that we don’t get behind and have information up about an event that is already passed, and it helps potential future members of our community to see what the ministry is about without being bogged down with details they don’t need to worry about in the initial stage of church shopping.

The other 20% of our new website is going to be inward focused. This will primarily be comprised of the calendar, downloads and registration sections.

Our new website is going to be a Cloversite. We’re very happy with their look and feel and are excited to debut the new www.oursaviours.com in May 2010. More details on the actual date will come as we get closer to launch. Once we launch it, I will have a series of blog posts that explain why we did what we did and all that fun stuff.

The resources I like to share with people are primarily blogs and books that I found useful while in the initial stages of rolling out our new website.

The 8Bit.io Network is a great network of blogs that are designed to help the church communication staff think strategically as well as develop spiritual as well as useful web presences for their churches.

• ChurchCrunch – focuses its coverage on web apps/services/technology, blogging, strategy, business/entrepreneurship, and community development.
• ChurchCreate – ChurchCreate focuses its coverage on art/design, environment production and development, video/audio engineering, and assorted technologies.
• ChurchIT – ChurchIT focuses its coverage on all types of geekery, like software, hardware, networking, and other assorted technologies.
• ChurchDrop – ChurchDrop focuses its coverage on mobile devices, software, web apps, services, and technology.

Another guy I’ve found extremely helpful when it comes to thinking strategically for the church is Tony Morgan. He’s written a book called Killing Cockroaches (which I’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog before) which is designed to help people do their jobs and be happy about it. This book doesn’t have a lot to do specifically with church web design but there are some principles in it that apply.

Kem Meyer is a super nice lady, Communications Director at Granger Community Church, and the author of the book Less Clutter. Less Noise. Take a quick look at this blog post by Kem about her thoughts on web strategy. Very informative.

I hope these resources help you and I know there are many more out there on this topic. If you would like to add to the list feel free to do so in the comments section.

In these modern times, we need to be thinking about what our church websites are saying to the world. Are they inwardly focused, with lingo that only a person that is a part of the community would recognize? Or are the outwardly focused, with easy to navigate pages and information that simply gets to the point? I think we can agree that we don’t want our church websites to end up looking like this (warning… turn your speakers down). Less is more.

There are a number of organizations performing relief effort down in Haiti right now.

ELCA Disaster Response partners have survived the quake and are already working to serve the people of Haiti.

This weekend in worship we’ll be asking that you make a donation to the ELCA Haiti Relief efforts.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE