Extract from Using Your Church web Site for Evangelism Grove Books Evangelism series EV53
The starting point in creating your own church web site must be to think about your possible audience. The question to ask is why new people might come to the church and then design your site to encourage this to happen. Do you have an active under fives group which attracts young parents? Is your church in demand for weddings? If so, these are the issues that need to be on your site. In due course new people may appreciate the minister’s sermons, but that is probably not their immediate need.
In the introduction I referred to Dora Bletchley – an imaginary character who represents a ‘typical reader’. It is worth creating half a dozen or so such characters. Give them names and short descriptions. Do they live in terraced housing, how old are they, how might the church help them, and so on. As you discuss your site, you can create content for these people. You will find yourself saying, ‘that’s OK for Dora, but Sally wouldn’t understand that.’ The St Mark’s Church site looked at in the previous section does not work for its intended audience because they took material – the Welcome Pack – that is given to newcomers to church services. Someone who comes to a service can be very different to someone browsing your web site for information.
The Yale Web Style Guide (http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/index.html) puts it like this:
‘The first step in designing a web-site is to make sure you have defined a set of goals - know what it is you want to accomplish with your web-site. Without a clear statement of purpose and objectives the project will begin to wander off course and bog down, or may go on past the point of diminishing returns. Careful planning and a clear sense of purpose are the keys to success in building web sites, particularly if you will be working as part of a team to build the site. Before beginning to build your web site you should:
· Identify your target audience
· Have a statement of purpose
· Know your main objectives
· Have a concise outline of the information your site will contain.’
The excellent article on web evangelism at http://www.brigada.org also suggests:
‘We humbly suggest it is not often wise to mix material which is intended primarily for Christians with that which is evangelistic. If a site is designed to be aimed at Christians, to tell them about your ministry, mission, or church, that is fine. But if you want material to be evangelistic, keep it quite separate from any material designed for believers. The situation is completely different from preaching a sermon in a guest service, where the speaker may well at one time be speaking mainly to the Christians present, and yet in the next breath be addressing the non-Christians. On the Web, you are not speaking to a captive group, but an individual.’
There is a real danger that we see the production of a web site as publishing. The software you use may even employ this term for the final stage of moving pages from your computer to the internet. But it is a dangerous word as it conveys the production of texts and images that others passively view. The web is much, much more. Your site should be about establishing a relationship with at least some of the site’s visitors.
Web site designers talk of visitors and never readers. If someone were to visit your church building in person, you hope they would be more than a passive observer. You would want to welcome them, talk with them, introduce them to others, invite them to sign a visitor’s book, maybe follow-up their visit by a call. These are all important words: visit, welcome, talk, introduce, invite, sign, call. This is not publishing but starting a relationship.
In creating your church web site, how do you describe your task? Is it merely informing Dora Bletchley of the time of the Family Service, or is it to invite her to attend? Is it merely to tell James and Sally that weddings take place between 10 and 4 or to forge a link with a couple who see your church (and maybe your God) as part of their marriage? I suggest that against every ‘Dora’ you create you jot down your objective using some of the words from this section. How are you going to establish a relationship with your visitors?
This change of perspective – from publishing to relationship building – will change the way you design your site.
Wherever possible, creating a church web site should be a team affair. The computer enthusiast who knows how to publish pages to a web server may not be the right person to write the content. The minister – long trained in writing essays and delivering sermons – may not be the best person to submit magazine-style articles.
What would make a good team?
· Someone who can write short, jargon-free articles.
· Someone who has an eye for layout, colours and design.
· Someone who can act as overall editor, preferably with some theological awareness and pastoral sensitivity.
· Someone who can assemble the pages and publish them on to the web.
· Someone with spare time to submit the details of the site to the various search engines and directories and ensure that the church’s web address is known in the community.
· Someone to update the content regularly if you have a site with news and event information.
· Someone to communicate the aims – and progress – of the site to the wider church and to encourage prayer for its effectiveness.
A team of seven is a very tall order in most churches! All these tasks may get rolled into one or two people. But in talking of a team, the point is that there are a variety of things to be done. This is not the sole domain of a computer enthusiast.
It is worth remembering that young people often have more skills – and certainly more enthusiasm – for this medium than many older people. Draft one or two young people into the team. This is one area in the church where they can help. A couple of decades ago churches could retain their young men by putting them in an (all-male) choir or asking them to serve at Holy Communion. Less so today. But the web is one area of church work which may fire their imagination. Get them involved, for their sakes as well as the church’s.
Helping to building a web site may also offer a worthwhile ministry to some less able to serve in other ways. For once, being housebound could be an advantage!
Another approach to working as a team is to gather the necessary skills – and perhaps budget – as an ecumenical project. People outside of the church are not interested in our doctrinal differences and variations in worship. A united web site is a witness in itself. Furthermore, as a churches-in-the-community site it may be more helpful for outsiders in the same way that a restaurant guide is easier to consult than half-a-dozen restaurant pub sites.
What type of material works well on the web?
· Because the present focus of the web is for information, people will look to a church’s web site for facts about the church and its life. When is the next parade service, how can I get married in the church, what is the history of the building?
· Because the style of the web is more magazine than book, the content will be small pieces of text. The church members may read the vicar’s sermons’ posted on the church site, but do not expect anyone else to. However, a short explanation of what it means to be a Christian today could be used.
· Because the approach of the web is non-authoritarian, the church’s site is adding to the web just its own perspective on life. Your beliefs are just as valid as anyone else’s but not more so. So personal testimonies and explorations of the journey of faith along the lines of ‘this is our story, tell us yours’ will be more acceptable than convincing people that Jesus is the Son of God. A church in Texas has a group photograph of a dozen church members on its home page. Clicking on each individual brings up his or her testimony. Young people can click on the teenagers, older people on the retired couple. See http://www.lufkinfirstassembly.org. It works very well as it introduces both church and personal faith from a variety of perspectives.
· Because the nature of the web is to allow responses, people will not be offended if responses are invited via comment forms and guest books. They can ignore them if they wish just as they can ignore the visitor’s book at the back of church. People are wary of their e-mail address being used for unwanted junk mail, so care needs to be taken in collecting personal details.
There is simply not sufficient space in this short booklet to go into how to write for the web. There are the usual warnings that go with any evangelistic endeavour. Ban jargon, relate to your audience, keep it short and simple. There are also a few techniques special to this medium such as using clear navigation, inviting responses via forms and linking to other sites with relevant material. On www.webevangelism.net there are some more detailed pointers and the www.brigada.org offers lots of useful advice.
A discussion on the many software tools available is also another book. Which web page editor is best? Internet magazines run reviews of web site design software and are a good place to look for up-to-date advice.
Not surprisingly, the best tool is the one most suited to the job, and this depends on the size and complexity of the site you are building. For a site of only a handful of pages almost any tool will do. To my mind it comes down to how easy it is for you to use. Do you have to understand HTML – the language of the web – or simply type in your content much as you would with a word processor?
Perhaps more importantly, does the software include page designs that you can use? That is, are there pre-designed buttons and colour schemes you can employ? In creating a web site you are not only creating content but also a design, and this is where many sites fall down.
If you need to develop a large site with scores or even hundreds of pages, you will also need to look at software with good site tools. These allow you to move pages around without losing the navigation links between the pages.
You can ask a web designer to build your site for you. They will charge but the advantage is that you will end up with a good-looking site. The big disadvantage is that since someone else built it, updating the content may be more difficult. You may not need to change the content from one month to the next if the site is a ‘brochure’ site that only describes the facilities of the church. But if it is a magazine site where the content needs to change at least monthly, updating it can be a problem as most churches will not be able to afford to return again and again to the designers.
You can mix the designer and the DIY approach. You could ask a designer to create some templates for you to work with or even just design the graphics. Then, using your own software, you could add the content. Be willing, very willing, to sacrifice complex design in favour of easy updating.
You may decide to create a site that has news items and lists of events. But who is going to update these on a regular basis? If different people frequently want to update a diary page, there will be a bottleneck if everything has to go through one designer.
The solution is an on-line database. A range of people will be able to contribute items (such as articles, event notifications and news items) by simply entering them into an on-line form. A database designed to show news items would have an administration form (only available by keying in a password, of course) which has boxes to fill in for the name, date and details of the item. Clicking on the add button would add the item to the database, which in turn would automatically update your news page to display it.
Copyright Vernon Blackmore 2001