Thursday, August 25, 2005
Church Webmasters - Stop Working for Free
Today I read an article called Church Webmasters - Stop Working for Free by Micheal Boyink. For those of you who are webmasters, web designers, IT specialists, or simply recognize the usefullness of the web as a relevant tool for the church's use, I'm extemely curious to hear your thoughts on the article.
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5 comments:
Jason,
Glad to see you in the, dare-i-say, blogosphere.
That article raises some interesting points, but I tend to think money is beside the point.
The problem as I see it... church administrators ask too much. Church webmasters promise too much. Both sides, often out of some sort of pride, want to do better than the neighboring churches. They have a picture in mind of what a great church website looks like, and they do everything they can to reach that without questioning whether that's a good picture.
I'd recommend ruthless simplicity. Every feature and every page you add to a church website will require at least 2 tylenol for everyone involved. Save the tylenol. It's not worth it.
Here's what I'd recommend:
1. Make it crazy easy for anyone and everyone to put content up. That might mean ditching your fancy CMS and going with a community blog, forum, or wiki. If it takes more than 3 clicks from the homepage to add content, it's too complex.
2. Drop all your preconceptions of how a site should be structured.
3. Allow anyone to add content; moderate it and keep the good stuff.
4. Allow the message of your church to form over time. Make it easy for people to add content, and it will.
5. Don't force anyone to be a part of it. If it's worth it's weight in bytes, it'll take off on it's own. If it doesn't, it's not simple enough.
6. Tend to the community you build. When someone writes something, thank them. Question them, engage them.
7. When you have enough content from your church community, organize it for others to quickly understand.
8. Keep it simple. Don't do any custom programming, don't show off to your graphic design friends, don't make anything you'd feel bad about if it was deleted.
For example, A moderated community blog in the style of metafilter.com would work much better for a lot of churches than their current sites. For that matter, A simple online forum could too. Craigslist.com is hugely popular, but relies on the most tylenol free architecture I've ever seen.
It'll take time before churches realize that, just like church, the web is more about community and less about information propagation. Those that do, the ones that can grow their sites like craigslist.com or any one of the thousands of online communities, will see their work rewarded.
So to sum up. Ruthless simplicity. Community not content. If it doesn't work, back to the drawing board.
That's my thirty-second manifesto. Thanks for asking!
amen - community not show...
There have been some good points made - both in the article and here on the blogs. However, I would like to note that things won't change simply because the webmaster is paid. Companies often pay programmers for years, and when the programmer moves on and they bring someone new in to take over, the new programmer will rewrite everything.
The same goes for people providing information about their work or ministry. No amount of money will make staffers or faculty or employees take a website seriously, rather getting them to understand the impact it can have will, and that is invaluable.
On a slighly related note, as a programmer and a Christian, I find that Open Source software, which is done extremely on a voluntary basis in a similar manner with the top notch often being picked up by companies when convenient to the companies, to be extremely reflective of the passages in Acts where it talks about the early church and how they shared everything. Personally, I think we as a Church (not simply RBC) have a lot to learn from that passage alone, and as a community we have a long ways to go.
Some really good comments here! Thanks for giving me some thoughts to chew on. Maybe I'll follow this up at some point with some further thoughts. Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
"Because when a church gets a website for free, it evidently has no value. Things with no value get replaced or reimplemented on a moment's notice, on staff whim, or as soon as the person leading the effort is called away."
he doesn't say "has no value" to whom? how does he know? it's a rant. there is a difference to be recognized between "value" as in appreciation and inherent worth and necessity and "value" as in that evidenced by monetary compensation.
there is a natural and understandable disparity between joe churchmember's concept of what goes into web design and maintenance and technoboy churchmember's concept (which includes awareness of the current market and wages and the intricacies and headaches involved).
joe churchmember's concept of composition/visual quality might not be in sync with current trends, or the value he places upon what constitutes a "sharp" website might be lower. or he might define "stewardship" more narrowly and/or short-sightedly. he might think -- "wow, a thousand bucks is a ton of money for a website! can we afford that? can't we just start a free blogger blog or use my new ISP homepage? how can we justify that kind of an expenditure just to have a 'nifty' site that keeps up with the joneses?"
unfortunately, i'm qualified to comment here. not because i'm a great designer/web tech--i'm not. i'm a complete hack who's so busy i don't have time to study the right way of getting things done. but i'm the only alternative they've got at my church.
mine's a church plant, pouring its money into people above programs. they are sacrificially generous but limited. a website is crucial to public ministry, to PR in the sense of a "front porch" for many in the community. if it's a lame site, it generates jack squat.
i'm still working past "lame," but what we've got and the new stuff is better than we would've had if we'd gotten what they paid for.
case in point: i lobbied with my church leadership to request a logo/identity design job from an outside but ministry-friendly designer. he agreed to do it for $50...for someone who would normally charge $800-1K for that, it was practically pro bono. he turned out a great little piece, but there were some hangups and disagreements and too many reiterations back and forth.
so finally, for the artist's sake, i canned the project, paid him his paltry $50, and designed my own (which was, in my mind, obviously substandard) makeshift logo/identity to tide us over. ironically enough, there weren't any hangups with mine (i.e. it was valued more highly, even though my supposedly web-savvy taste can distinguish the shameful disparity in design comparisons).
in general, i agree with the mentality that a church should, if possible, pay volunteers what they can. however, it's just not always practical or feasible.
if the volunteer can handle it without compromising other clear-black-and-white principles from Scripture, and if that system works for that church, i say that an article (rant?) is just one viewpoint. it doesn't prove to me that i'm violating any biblical mandate by going this route. it doesn't even prove to me that i'm violating logic. if you operate deliberately with an eternal longview/"save life-lose it" ultimate aim in mind for your mental-temporal expenditures here on earth, unpaid volunteer web design is not necessarily a waste. not in any sense of the word.
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