The most basic approach to constructing a church website is to publish the same information you might compose if you were preparing a printed brochure. This is the easiest approach since the information rarely changes and therefore rarely needs attention. It's a good idea to avoid time-sensitive information that requires regular updating until you're sure you're ready to keep up with it.

To decide what should appear here, think about your audience. The information in a brochure is essentially stuff your congregation should already know. This site is not for your congregation. This site exists to provide outsiders with the core information about your church and should be built with their needs in mind.

Not only are you providing basic details, your site is an opportunity to make visiting your church as comfortable an experience as possible. Think about the different types of people who might visit and what their unique needs are. For example:

• Where are the handicapped entrances?
• What will I do with my three kids?
• Do I have to wear a suit or is my Harley jacket acceptable?

Let the truth of the gospel make your guests uncomfortable, not finding a seat (that’s a whole different blog…).

At a minimum, I recommend these 7 things:

1. Name and City of your church – the city is important for search success
2. Contact information, such as phone, email and physical address
3. Service times, formats, how people typically dress
4. Maps both to your location and then into your location (i.e., if your "front door" is actually the side entrance, say so!)
5. Core beliefs
6. Children’s programming/childcare available concurrent with services and a mention (not the whole plan) that you have a safety plan in place.
7. Your structure for going deeper (e.g., “We have home groups meeting throughout the week, contact the church office for details”)

As you can see, these are only the basics. Even as I compiled this list, I found myself thinking about other information that would be helpful, like the number of events available for youth each week. Yes, the more that your site can currently reflect your church, the more helpful it will be to your potential guests, but someone has to take responsibility for keeping the growing website beast well-fed and happy and that means making choices.

No matter how comprehensive your site becomes, a good handle on the core elements and being seeker-friendly are important to keep in mind. A couple excellent examples of this on larger sites are the Before You Attend page at New Hope Community Church in Loudonville, Ohio, and the New Here? page at Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas.

Next up: Blog as church website.

I've said before that foregoing a church website is akin to not bothering to list your church in the phonebook. In fact, it could be that it's even worse. Even the most basic hosting options allow you more than enough space to post all of the administrivia one could ever hope to know about your church. Either way, to do so is to cut yourself off from a whole generation of potential believers through simple omission.

The online face of churches ranges from electronic brochure to an individual "experience." Value lies in each! I promise I'm not being non-committal or saying that all paths to web presence enlightenment are equal. It's just that what your church chooses to publish must be a good fit to the talents, available time, passion and focus of your ministry team.

The key is to have just enough web-presence to represent the ministry without biting off more than you can chew. It might possibly be worse to have a website that outlines the "upcoming" potluck that happened six months ago with a photo from two pastors ago, than to have none at all. What does that say about the life of your church when the one event on your site is long outdated?

So ask yourself these questions:

Who is my intended audience and what do we need to tell them? Is this for your congregation, looking for information on upcoming events and ministry opportunities? Someone shopping for your church who Googled churches in your area? Both? These thoughts will shape the end product significantly.

Who is going to keep this thing updated? How often are we willing to commit to updates? The website's complexity and need for attention should parallel the availability and skill of the manpower. If these human resources are limited, keep it simple and stick to information that rarely changes, such as your name, phone and location. There are fill-in-the-blank templates that are perfect for you. Use caution here, building the site is easy, it's maintenance that becomes a huge black hole sucking up your time.


In the next couple postings in this series on your church's web presence, we'll tackle a few related ideas and approaches: Church site as brochure, Church site as blog, must-have components, becoming findable, and a couple bare-bones design tips (I'll not pretend to be a designer).

We can't be serious all the time! If you like puzzles, check out Jigzone.com. At Jigzone you can upload pictures and create your own puzzles. I made one out of our temporary Church 2.0 logo. Check it out...