I am mostly writing to church ministry types who have much less knowledge about these things. There is still a big belief out there that all you need is a cool-looking website with your service times and a map. Most churches look at more than that as a massive luxury.

I even ran into a church recently that was spending over a hundred dollars monthly for a yellow pages ad, but balked at spending more than $30 monthly on a website. I talked to a large church today in Tennessee who told me that they had just launched an expensive website. I didn’t know what to say. It looked like an AngelFire site with a homemade logo. That is who I’m trying to reach. In coming posts I will be discussing less design, and more Web 2.0 theory.

Please, keep up your comments, even the cranky ones. If you totally disagree with me on something, write it up and I’ll either link to it, or put it up here under your name. I love it! Keep it up

Great point, and as always, thanks for the comment. I would be very interested in hearing the information from that conference, as well as the specifics of your water cooler survey.

I completely agree with your function trumps form argument (reducing your point, I know). That is why at Epiphany Systems, we are focused on these aspects of social connectivity. In my analysis of the websites on this page, I am in part 3 of what will be a long look at all aspects of web ministry.

I wanted to start with simple things everyone could see at a really rudimentary level. If I stopped with this, it would be ignorant, but please travel with me along this path. I am really interested in your thoughts on all of this.

This post had to do with design, because I know that most ministry professionals will be looking to analyze things at that level first. I am trying to show people what works, just on an immediate “first look” basis.

That is starting to become one of my pet peeves online, is people that put up ways to see if you have a good site or not, and then put up a list of Web design 101 stuff. That stuff is good to think about, but really only matters as an after thought. Websites that do not take in to any account anything about social connectivism are pretty much drying up and dying, no matter how well they are designed.

This last week I presented on “Will Web 3.0 change how we educate?” at a conference. Web 2.0 is starting to fade, and we as the church are still worried about Web 1.0 stuff like colors and use of Christianese phrases? (I actually did a little experiment once and found that all of my non-Christian waiter co-workers in college were confused by a very famous Christian’s writings that were used as examples of “Christianese-free language.” It was quite hilarious).

I guess I have a hard time seeing web design having anything to do with web “ministry”. Good web design just gives you an online pamphlet to look at. Ministry actually implies connecting with someone in a social manner of some kind. Maybe you will cover that next, so sorry if I am jumping the gun for part 4 or 5

These are certainly valuable thoughts on a vital issue.

Have you seen our church site self-assessment tool at
InternetEvangelismDay.com/design
where we also try to look at these things.

Blessings

Tony