Over at Church Marketing Sucks, Kevin Hendricks has done an excellent series on creating church sites. The first post in the series hits on something that often gets overlooked: the planning stage.
According to this post, 22% of churches don’t have websites. If you find yourself in the 22%, it’s easy to want to get something up quickly. We need a site now. We need to be on YouTube and Twitter and Flickr and Facebook and Google+ and YouVerse and… we need it all now.
Hang on there, Kemosabe. Before doing anything, there are some questions to be addressed. Hendricks has done a good job of pointing out some of the most important.
How does your church communicate? What do you communicate? Why do you communicate it? Who’s your audience? What’s the best way to reach that audience? What are your goals? How are you going to reach those goals? What’s your style? Who’s responsible for the communication? Who makes the final decisions? Is communication a priority?
Before you start filming videos and writing your “About Us” statement, take some time and work through these questions. Doing that at the very beginning will save you lots of headaches down the road.
Can you think of other questions that need to be addressed in the initial planning stage?
Tim, at the end of your posts there is a request for everyone to leave a comment, so I will, Sorry to say this so plainly, but your site has gone to the dogs, believe me I know, it is better not to have a blog than have one you care nothing about.
Laymond, what is the basis for your claim? Why do you bother commenting then?
Wendy asked, why do you comment? -because I know Tim can do better than just comment on something someone else has said.
Laymond, I value what Tim shares. Who made you the quality control?
Laymond,
Woof!
Wendy,
Thanks for the defense, but it’s not necessary. Even Laymond could have seen that the “request for comments” was a request for contributions on the subject, had he been interested in actually contributing something. Note that the post ends with a call for additional questions to be considered.
Interesting article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
Grace and peace,
Tim
Tim Archer says:
November 9, 2011 at 8:23 am
“Appreciate all the comments. Great info, great insights. (Man, I sound like one of those spam comments) Hope this discussion will be helpful to some.”
Tim, I actually beliece you confessed, before I said a thing.
I know two things about trolls – feed trolls and they grow. Cut them and they regenerate.