Two Approaches To Displaying Events

In general, there are two approaches to displaying the events that are going on in your church: the calendar and the list. I've used each of these methods before, and each has it's pros and cons. In order to help you decide what is best for your church website, here's a little about each from my experiences:

• Calendars: Calendars can be a great way of showing what is going on in your church. However, many online calendar tools can be difficult and unwieldly, or the good ones can be very expensive and you still might not get all the features that you want. The manual updating of calendars will take up a lot of time and will need to be updated frequently so that they don't get out of date. Another thing I've noticed is that calendars work better in larger churches where there are a lot of regular activities going on. In a small church where there is little more than a Sunday service and a weekly Bible Study going on, a calendar tends to look bare.
• Lists: Lists are very simple and striaght-forward tools for keeping your congregation on the up-and-up. I personally like to keep two lists of events: one for regular events that rarely change, and one for one-time events that come up occasionally. In these cases, I have a list that I can manually change as needed since the items don't change very item, and then I have a list I can use with a database where the changes can come quite frequently. Even if I didn't use a database, I'd have the two that I could keep and display seperately. I also it's easier to keep the regular activities on the main page of the site and then keep the other announcements on a separate page if need be. However, in a very large church, both these lists may become large an almost unmanageable.

As you can see, there is a place for each approach. Calendars tend to work well in situations where the information needs to be condensed as much as possible, but lists work better when there isn't as much information to manage.

One last note I'd like to share is that I've found is that people seem to plan better with calendars when they can see the dates laid out in front of them. With lists, people don't necessarily associate the date listed with a day of the week or month, and they can forget a single event if the actual date is not reinforced with them on several occasions. With this in mind, you may find that an approach using both lists and calendars to some extent may be best for your church.

Either way, the most important thing is to make sure that the dates are out there and available!