How To Ineffectively Use Your Church Website
Most of the time here at IJHAW, we spend our time examining how we can make our web sites more effective. However, there are things we can do which, despite all the bells and whistles we can add, can make a church website completely useless. Pardon my tongu-in-cheek humor.
- Don't Post Your Service Times - After all, why would anyone want to know when the service started?
- Don't Post Your Location/Address - This is especially ineffective for churches that do not have their own buildings.
- Don't Post Any Contact Information - If they really want to get a hold of you, they can just use the phone book, right? No chance they'd just move on to the next church website.
- Use A "My First Website" Design - No, this doesn't make it look like we're not even trying, or that we're completely behind the times.
- Write About What Your Church Won't Stand For - Nothing oozes love like singling out all the things your church hates.
- Have Broken Links - Because people can just look at the Status Bar and figure out where the link was supposed to go.
- Have Music Playing In The Background - If they don't like the same music you do, then you don't want them at your church anyway.
- Don't Keep Your Website Content Up-to-Date - Surely, visitors will realize that you just don't have the time to get them information.
- Don't Even Bother Having A Website - We like our members like we like our Senators, over 30!
Thanks everyone!
Kelsey, you're right. And most of the time I believe that church websites should be geared more at non-members than members. Members tend to have more resources for information at their disposal.
Brad, that's a lot of the reason I have this site: to help church webmasters get better at what they do. In fact, I recently did a whole CSS Primer series.
Shonnie, I don't think you're as bad off as you think. I would be curious to see your new site when it is launched, though. It's always interesting to see how grow and progress towards having a stronger and better presence on the web.
Awesome Post! I am working on my church website right now. I am using wordpress. We had a site up and some Turkish hacker hacked it. I will be reading your site often! Nice contribution to the Group Writing Project at ProBlogger. My http://www.brauchtalk.com/how-to-keep-your-relatio..." title="How To">Hot To is up also.
LOL I love this. My husband is a youth pastor (jamestippins.com) and I agree so totally that I am wiping tears of laughter from my eyes right now. The Geocities thing actually made me laugh out loud!
To spare me the embarrassment, I won't link to our church's site. It's so very bad, out of date, ugly, etc., but still better than your two pics at least. I am a very busy designer/blogger so I have been bugging them for 5 years (though they went with a 'professional' company instead of a lowly site designer that they actually know and trust). Ugh...
Anyway, had to comment and thank you for this. I found you via Problogger when I was searching to see if my own entry was posted yet Hee Hee.
I'll be back.
And I always thought they were there so we wouldn't look at porn...
Great list. Love it!
Thanks for the encouragement again everyone!
Many of those ideas are "well, of course you don't want to do that" thoughts, yet there are a surprising number of sites that miss the boat. So, remember that it's humor with a message.
And Robyn, I did the same thing when I first saw those images. That Geocities site was awful a decade ago, and unlike clothing, it won't come back in fashion (even though I would say that it does still look better than 75% of MySpace pages).
Well said. Most churches put a website on a back burner, or hire a 16y/o teenager that "know something about computers", to do their site.
A church website is a reflection of the church, and should be professional. You make good points about things often left out!