Distributing The Wealth
I read a quality article a few weeks ago at ProBlogger where Darren Rowse, a former church pastor in Austrailia, writes about building community in a blog by giving jobs to readers. Please take the time to read it because it's excellent advice.
Now, I've previously written about how managing a church website can be made easier by having people in specific roles, but the idea of building community through them is a great idea! And Darren is right on with his analogy to the church's welcoming strategy. We should aim to do the same things with our websites and get people involved early and often. Delegate different jobs, such as updating events or church news, to different people. Even if they just write up the basics in an e-mail and send it to you to put into the site, they can contribute! It also creates a sense of usefulness and community within the site, which builds involvement and a great online environment.
So try to think of ways that you can share the wealth of serving the Lord through the web. I'm sure you'll be able to find several people in your congregations that will be more than eager to lend a helping hand if they know you're willing to accept it!
I think you are right. There is a lot to be said with involvement both in the development and maintenance of a website, but also in the general user experience of a website.
I suppose though, if the website is not a blog, or if there is no interface for the 'workers' to add and edit information and they have to do it with code, then it could be difficult to find help considering not many know code well enough to do it, and if they do, there's the risk that they wouldn't know enough and could mess things up.
But besides that, I could see a collaborative website not only much richer with content and ideas, but also more appealing to users. I know that I am much more drawn to 'community feel' websites than websites that are just run and managed by a person or two (not in all cases though).