A couple days ago, I made the accusation that most church Web sites flat-out stink, and I gave three tools to start the process of evaluating your church Web site and discovering God’s intent for your Web site. I know it sounds a bit cliché, but you better believe that God works through the Internet to reach lives.

I’m still not ready to talk about publishing platforms.  Most pastors that I talk to want me to jump past all the other stuff and head right to “what do I need to buy.”  The problem is that you can’t buy a successful Web presence - it’s an ongoing investment.  It’s a strategy.  For most, if not all, growing churches, the Web site is the central hub of information.

So, how do you de-stinkify your current church Web site.  By the way, if you scored under 10 on WebsiteGrader.com, take heart - so do most other church Web sites.  Now, do something about it.  Here are some action items for your consideration.

1. Determine your target audience.  You need to know who you’re marketing to before you throw stuff onto the Web.  Lifechurch.tv’s Tony Steward details this way better than I can in this post.
2. Plan out your site’s core content and navigation before you enlist any techie geeks.  Don’t just post every piece of information imaginable.  Bobby Gruenewald suggests that we design our mobile site first, before we do anything else.  This forces us to cut the fluff and stay on target.
3. Realize that while techie geeks are necessary for the technical aspects of a Web site, you cannot expect them to own the site and run solo with it.  The geek is not a skilled writer or marketer, he is a skilled designer or developer.  Here are some tips from Jason Reynolds.
4. View the Web as a central communication tool for your congregation and community.  It shouldn’t be a one-man-show or a place that’s neglected.  The Web is not your business card.  Allow it to be the hub that other sources pull from.  For instance, in the weekly bulletin, direct people to the Web for more information rather than giving a phone number.  This saves time for the person responsible for the event by not having to respond to so many calls about an event.  That time can be re-invested in their ministry.  The shift to the Web being the central hub of information will not happen overnight, but you must work to patiently make this ever-important shift.
5. Encourage the entire staff to have ownership.  Everyone should be a contributor.  Jason Reynold’s  post (above) encourages all ministerial staff to write three articles per week for the Web site.  Kevin McCord’s also weighs in here with his post on Web presence.
6. KISS - Don’t have a Web site developed that takes a rocket scientist to update.  Make Web maintenance easy enough for Betty Sue and Reverend Mike.  MeanDean’s got a list similar to mine concocted here.

That’s enough tips for now.  More to follow.  Bottom line, if your church Web site stinks, you need to fix it.  It’s time.

ACS is our trusted partner for church management software.  I like them a lot, and you’ve likely seen me write about them in the past.  I dropped a major bomb on one of their product leaders today, basically an ultimatim.

I don’t like to be the guy giving ultimatims.  Nobody likes that guy, and I like being liked.  But, I did it.  I did it for my church, for your church, and honestly for the Kingdom.  If interested, you can read the full email history.

See, the problem is simple.  There’s not a way for me to highlight the available serving opportunities to our Web site visitors and enable them to sign up for one.  I can show them the opportunities but leave them guessing as to how to actually get involved.  I can give three-step instructions of how to sign up.  But I can’t make a link directly to the page that has all the opportunities listed out.

So, I dropped a bomb on William, the product lead for AccessACS.  I like him.  I got to spend some time with him at the convention this year, and he’s a really good guy and a top-notch developer.  ACS is fortunate to have him on staff.  So, I don’t like giving William an ultimatim, but I felt like it was just that important.  Check the full email history if you use AccessACS or are considering it.

In all of this, ACS could dig in their heels and refuse to do anything, but I’ve been working with them for long enough to know that they won’t do that.  They listen and respond to their customers, and that’s why I call them our trusted partner in ministry.

I was talking with a pastor on the phone today about disaster relief, and I asked him if his church had a Web site.  I had searched Google using a number of different phrases, but nothing could be found.  He gave me the address of the site, and it looks pretty enough, but so many SEO rules were broken on the home page alone.

It got me thinking - why do so many churches have cruddy Web sites?  Do we really not understand the Kingdom potential?  Do we really believe there aren’t people in our churches who can help us with this?  Are we overwhelmed by the number of advertisements that come in from people trying to pawn the latest, greatest Web product?

I assume it’s a combination of all of those things.

This post is intended for churches who don’t have the luxury of having a person on staff who knows the intricacies of Web design and SEO.  To you, here are some practical steps for evaluating and correcting your church Web site.

1. First, and I’m not joking, pray about your church Web site.  I believe God wants to work through it.  Pray for guidance.
2. Second, you need to subscribe to Heal Your Church Website.  Here and here are some good posts to get you started.  I’ve been following Dean for many years - he’s got some good, solid advice.
3. Third, run your site through WebsiteGrader.com.  It’s free, and it’s fast.  One warning… your site will get a grade from 0-100.  That number is merely a guide, a starting point.  They are trying to show you some of the glaring SEO issues with your site.  A high number doesn’t necessarily mean your site is any good.  However, a low number is a pretty good indication that your site is stinking up the Web… just sayin.
4. Finally, make some changes.  I’ll unpack this one a little more, but for now, get crackin on the first three steps.

This week has been “Web-tastic!” I have gotten several of my Web projects into a beta or production state. Haha… it sounds like I actually do projects like that.

Anyway, I wrote earlier this week about launching fbcbelton.me and our serving opportunities. We’re now starting to hear from members and regular attenders, and we’ve started receiving database updates and requests to volunteer for opportunities. Pretty good for a week!

Yesterday I launched commenting on sermons.  I’m using Disqus to do it.  It’s a little awkward to have two commenting systems on the same Web site, but I don’t really know an easy way around that - other than using Disqus for the whole site (not really interested in that).  My boss thought it’d be good to give people the opportunity to interact with each other in response to the sermon.  I totally agree, and I think some weeks it’ll be much more active than others.  It’d be interesting if the pastor started asking people to head to the Web site and comment.  I was surprised how much coding I had to do to make this process automated, but now that it’s automated, we’re good to go.

We have begun beta testing our online room reservation and calendaring form.  I don’t really want to send the URL for that and have a whole bunch of people innundate it.  This is a way for us to archive all our room set-up forms for the future, send out e-mail notifications to appropriate parties, and create a work flow.  Instead of having binders loaded with these things, we can make MySQL do the work for us.  Instead of asking the newsletter lady and the Web guy to type illegible handwritten blurbs, we can make the people type them in themselves.  Instead of having incomplete forms dropped in our mailboxes, we can run validation and make sure all the required fields are filled in.

Finally, I made the mobile version of our church Web site much more functional and pretty this week.  I added shortcuts for those not using a touch screen, added some color, added our logo, removed some fluff, and added some very important pages that I had omitted at first.

That’s pretty good for a week!  Tomorrow I have to go back to my network admin stuff.  It’s much less glamorous. :)

I just did a soft-launch of fbcbelton.me yesterday.  Yes, I admit that I completely ripped of Jason’s team who is getting ready to launch northwoods.me.  Both Jason and I are using AccessACS, a Web product from ACS Technologies.  We have actually been using Access for a while, since February, but we made a major shift in our practice that necessitated a name change and re-launching.

Previously, we were only uploading members of the church and their families.  This was both a privacy issue and a cost issue.  It’s too expensive to upload everyone as the price structure is based on the number of records.  The problem was that Sunday School teachers were never happy with their rosters because they did not show the regular families who hadn’t joined yet.

So, we made a shift from calling our service FBC Member Connect to calling it fbcbelton.me, and we’re now uploading everyone who has attended or given in the last 4-6 months.  We’re also rolling out serving functions to allow people to volunteer for opportunities within the church.

To my friends at ACS, I beg of you, give me some RSS feeds.  Let me include links back to Access, formatted in the way that I want them formatted on my main site.  For instance, give me an RSS feed of all of the serving opportunities.  Give me an RSS feed of all events available for registration broken down by the campus and department chosen.  So, a separate RSS feed for youth at the central campus, adults at the downtown campus, etc.  In doing this, you will enable churches to better connect their people.

How about your church, how are you enabling self-service information for your members and regular attenders?