Writing church web sites

I believe that writing church web sites has a special set of challenges and considerations. If you are in charge of writing, or planning to write a church web site, I hope this will be valuable to you.

This is not a technical guide—see my web authoring section for that. I do recommend learning to code by hand rather than using FrontPage, Composer, Dreamweaver or similar tools. You might find you want to move to those eventually, but if you start by hand, you’ll have a much better understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes.

I have been in charge of my church web site for a few years now, and have learned what to do and what not to do, often the hard way.

Support

Firstly, I believe you should get the support of your church leadership. If you are already competent at web authoring, you should make it clear that you will be the authority for design—people will always have an idea of how the site should look, and they’re usually wrong! Be willing to accept suggestions for content, though.

Who is it for?

During your early research, you need to decide what the site’s goals are, which could be one of more of the following, and perhaps others I haven’t considered:

Don’t take on too much!

It’s always tempting to try to include everything on your web site, and suggestions from others will add more persuasion. Try to resist this at all costs: people’s commitment to provide content is a lot less than their enthusiasm to suggest it! It is better not to include something at all than to include low-quality outdated information.

If someone really wants to maintain a section, such as youth matters, give them a “probation” period of providing content. Ideally, get them to supply HTML to plug straight into the site, saving you work. If they show genuine commitment, keep publishing, otherwise drop it and delete the outdated information.

Another alternative is to encourage them to develop their own site, and then you can link to it. We have done this with our youth site, which is designed by and for the youth. I certainly wouldn’t use that design for the general church congregation though!

It’s a long-term commitment

There’s no point setting up a site and then leaving it. Maintenance is essential, and requires long-term commitment. It needn’t take a lot of your time, especially if you keep the content down (as above), but you must keep on top of it. Seeing a church site with a two-year old diary list does not give a positive impression of the church’s liveliness and enthusiasm!

Keep it clean

I have seen a lot of sites with a hideously complex layout, covered in poor quality graphics, with non-intuitive navigation. Don’t fall into this trap: if you design it like that, you’ll be the only person that understands it! Look around your congregation: what do you imagine the average level of web-savviness is? Half are below that, don’t exclude them…

It’s tempting for a beginner at web design to show off how many features he or she can cram onto a page. Avoid that at all costs.

As two examples of the right way to do it, I (humbly) present my church web site and York City Church. Both have a clean, simple layout, with obvious navigation.

Make it accessible

Unless your church has a policy of excluding people with sight or mobility impairment, you’ll want to make the site as accessible as possible. Keeping it simple and writing valid code is a good start, but there are many other things you can do. I suggest reading through Dive into Accessibility, preferably before starting your site.

Make it visible

Include the web site address in all church stationery. Register it with major search engines like Google, AltaVista, AllTheWeb and others. Also include it in the appropriate section of the Open Directory Project—search for “billericay baptist” to see the two sections I’ve used.

Now go and do it!

If I haven’t put you off yet, go ahead and design! If you want any advice, feel free to contact me or even engage my services; alternatively, there is a really helpful (if somewhat blunt) community on the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.* newsgroups.

Please let me know if you’ve written a site after reading this, and whether you found it useful or not.