Church and Ministry Website Poll
Jan 16th, 2009 by Doug
I am amazed at the number of church and ministry website companies that have popped up over the last few years. It seems like there were only a handful of companies a few years ago that offered services to create and get your church or ministry online.
With so many choices many churches and ministries wonder where to start. I know that this is driven by the size of the staff and if there is an on staff IT, graphic designer or technology person. I imagine the discussions within the staff teams are: Do we hire someone to create a website for us? Do we get a volunteer from the church to help us? Do we use a template? Which company? etc.
I have been involved with the development of a number of different websites over the last 11 years. In my next post I will share some thoughts and lessons learned. I would like to hear from you.
How does your church or ministry manage its website? Is there a person on staff? Does your church or ministry work with an outside company? If you use an outside company or service which one do you use?
Well, here in Brazil we don’t have almost any ministry website companies that assist churches with there websites so we the Youth Group decided to do it ourselves and its been great… We have 1 php programer, 3 journalists, 2 marketing analysts, 3 designers and , 1 Video specialist and 1 crazy leader that gets everyone excited about his ideias… And we are all volunteers…
Visit us at http://www.redejovem.com and give us your feedback even if its in english… Well thats if you know a little portuguese to get around…
We have a creative pastor on sight and a graphic design artist that coordinate with an outside company to create the layout and function of our webpage…
We’ve got volunteers who look after the website and our graphic design, and a staff member coordinates, writes the copy for print and web. Don’t know what we’d do without the dedicated volunteers!
Having only ~150 members, our site is managed by individual church members (volunteers). I think we’d need many more members before we could seriously considering having any sort of dedicated technical/creative staff. I’ve personally managed the site for the last four years but we’re starting to look at it a bit differently these days in terms of outreach and discipleship. As part of our discipleship efforts I’m in the process of involving younger members of the congregation (20 somethings) in the maintenance and support of the site. The idea is to help give them a more direct investment in the church and provide opportunities to encourage them in their daily walk.