Two weeks ago I posted an article entitled Developing a Website Update Policy, part 12 in this series about the development of my church’s new website. If you’ve been following this series, you know I’ve been posting one article each week. Except for last week. Last week I was really busy trying to make a project deadline and didn’t have time to write an article. Maybe you noticed… or maybe you didn’t because you’re so busy with work, family, ministry, cleaning the house, baking pies, getting your fantasy football roster done early this week. (Note to self…)
Chances are you’ve had times in your life when you just couldn’t get everything done you were supposed to. It happens occasionally, or maybe more than occasionally for some of us. But what if the person responsible for updating your church website is too busy to get that done? Let’s take a look at what happens and how to prevent it.
You’ve probably heard horror stories about out-dated church websites gathering dust and cobwebs. Perhaps they sounded something like this…
The Volunteer Vampire
An enthusiastic, well-intentioned volunteer offers to create the church an awesome new website for free. He comes through on his promise, and the new site looks great. Then his boss tells him he needs to work 60 hours a week to meet a deadline, his mother get sick and is in the hospital, and his son is suddenly struggling in math and needs help with his homework every night. Poof! The volunteer seems to vanish. He is no longer seen out in daylight. Before you know it, it’s 2 weeks before Christmas and that great site that was launched in August still has info about the summer picnic and not a word on the Christmas Eve services. Church members no longer visit the site any more, and people looking online for a church don’t visit because they can’t find any information about the services.
The Staff Swamp Monster
The church decides it needs a new website. The very creative and energetic youth pastor seems like the obvious choice for the job. She’s young, she’s always online, and she does graphic and video stuff for the students all the time. She more than any of the staff has been vocal about getting a new site and jumps at the chance to lead the charge. She does an admirable job and everyone raves about the new site when it’s launched. With the site done, she shifts her focus back to student ministries and finds herself swamped with work. It’s too much and she gets sucked under. She’s behind on planning some activities because of all the work she did on the website, then there’s the annual summer camp, and then after months of hard work without a day off she goes out of town for two weeks to visit family. The senior pastor starts ranting about why the spring outreach event is still on the homepage when the kickoff of the big fall sermon series is only a week away.
The truth about life is that it gets busy. (In fact, if I hadn’t been so busy, this would have made for a good Halloween post 3 weeks ago) When life gets busy we have to start making choices about what gets done and what gets left undone. It comes down to priorities.
Consistency is HUGE
For a church website to be truly effective it must be updated consistently. A person can never go to your church website and find obsolete information or fail to find information on an upcoming event. If it happens even once, some trust in your website will be lost. If it happens once a month or more, trust in the site will be lost and people will stop visiting it.
If your church has a website you must be religious about updating it (no pun intended).
Barriers to Consistency
Last time I wrote about developing a website update policy. The problem with most churches is that if they have a website update policy at all, that it’s flawed in at least two major areas.
- A single administrator. The first flaw is having only one person who is able to update the website. That person is either the only one with the technical skills, the software, or the password to change the website. Regardless of whether the person is a volunteer or paid staff, everybody has times when they are sick or on vacation or otherwise unable to fulfill that responsibility. To ensure your website is consistently up-to-date, you’ve got to have at least two people with the training and access to update it.
- Low Priority. The second flaw is giving a low priority to having the church website up-to-date. If you delegate the responsibility for updating the church website to a volunteer, understand that no matter how faithful they are, that responsibility will still come after their family, their job, their health, and perhaps other things. If you add that responsibility to a person who already has a full plate of ministry responsibilities that have a higher priority, then when that person’s ministries get busy, the site will not get updated.
Consistency Requires Redundancy
After we launched my church’s new website, Tim, our executive pastor had me train him and another staff member on updating the website. This turned out to be a critically important decision. I’ve been so busy with work, family, and other ministry responsibilities that if updating the website had been left to me as a volunteer, it probably would not have been updated in the last month. Additionally, Tim has been so busy with other responsibilities at the church, that he alone wouldn’t have been able to keep it up to date either.
For any system to be truly consistent there must be built-in redundancies. Updating a website is no exception.
Beating the CMS Drum
In addition to recommending every church have multiple administrators and make updating the website an extremely high priority, I can’t help but once again point to the value of a Content Management System. Utilizing a CMS as the basis for your church website makes developing redundancies and consistency far easier than creating a website with HTML or web development software.
- A CMS allow you to give administrative access to as many people as you like.
- A CMS doesn’t require software to be installed on every administrator’s computer.
- A CMS makes updating the site easier than writing HTML or using web development software. That means updating the website isn’t limited to super techy people.
Taking these steps should prevent your church website from experiencing its own horror story and turning into a virtual ghost town.
Have you got a website horror story to share? Got any other suggestions for preventing them?
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3 Comments
Yes, this brought up some good points. The church I attend has a new web page/design that doesn't seem to be getting much attention. I'd like to forward this article, but wouldn't want to offend the admin…
Aman, Aman, brother. I've also experienced a much worse situation more frequently than not. A church hires a web designer that holds it's web pages hostage! The web designer creates pages that can not be accessed by ordinary people and updated! The church's ministry then is dependant on that one web designer who has little to no motivation in seeing the website improve it's ranking or outreach capabilities! This is the most common problem I run across. Why, a church is better off running a free blog than putting itself at the mercy of a web designer that discovers the ministry uninteresting or unprofitable enough to tempt them into improving their relationship with the client. My point, hire only designers that really care if the gospel is preached. I understand that a good pastor hates to preach guilt 24/7, but if your web designer doesn't feel obligation to you after you sign on the dotted line, YOU'VE GOT BIG TROUBLE buddy.
Amazing article posted in 2007, wow, great! 🙂