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As Web Master for Halton Presbytery, I have been asked several times for advice on designing and maintaining a church web site. I have put together a few comments that might be useful.
There is lot of advice on the web and in books on general principles for web site design. As with all sites, church web sites should be colourful, attractive, easy to read and navigate, informative, changing, etc. These comments are intended to discuss issues that are specific to a church web site.
Most of the material here is intended for everyone involved in the creation of a web site. There is some technical details that would only be meainingful to the system implementors.
There are many guidelines for web site usablity - ideas about making it easy to read, and to navigate to items of interest. Probably the best first rule is to pick one strategy, and follow it carefully.
To ensure that your users enjoy your site, and keep returning to it, it is necessary to keep it up to date, and to change it frequently. People will stop using it if they find that the information is not current, or that there is rarely anything new to check out.
I would recommend that only one or two people be involved in updating the web site. Others who wish to post material should be instructed to forward the information to those authorized to make the changes. Allowing many people to update the site opens the way to abuse. More likely, however, is that there will be more risk that the site will be damaged by someone accidentally changing something incorrectly, or losing material, or making other mistakes. (It would be a good idea to have someone - perhaps the office administrator - check the site regularly to see that things look OK.)
I have found that it is helpful that only a few pages change regularly. For example, on the Halton Presbytery site, we have a "news" page and an "events" page - most of the other pages don't change very often (e.g. the "Contacts" page, with contact information, etc., and the "Schedule" page, which is updated each year), or have very specific purposes that are of interest to a specific audience (e.g. the "Jobs" page). That way, when viewers come to the site, they only have to check a few pages to find out what's new.
It may also be useful to put some "news" information on the front page. It is a nusiance to maintain, but that way viewers can quickly see if the site has been changed since the last time they looked.
One concern that church web sites need to take into account is that a lot of church people seem to have older, less functional, computer equipment - web designers tend to have the newest stuff! A site has to work and look good not just on the latest and greatest displays, but on older, smaller equipment. It is almost impossible for make a site look really good on a 600x800 screen configured for large fonts - there just isn't enough space to do the things that you would like to do. However, the site has to at least be usable in that mode.
In the future, other small-screen configurations will also become important - people may want to view your site using cellphones, Blackberries, etc. If you want to prepare for this, here are IBM's guidelines for creating web sites to work with those kinds of devices.
Although most people use the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser, a growing number are using others, such as Firefox and Opera, and browsers for non-PC systems, such as Macs. It is a good idea to test your site using alternate browsers, just to make sure everything works right. IE is infamous for ignoring some web standards, and so things can look fine on IE, but not on other browsers. (Firefox has a downloadable extension called "HTML Validator" that I have found very useful for ensuring that the web site code conforms to standards.)
One important question concerns how information should be posted on the web. The best answer is to use HTML format. This is the "standard language" of the web, the simplest and fastest to view, and the most convenient for readers.
Unfortunately, it is a difficult format to create and modify, requiring special training that most people will not want to bother with. For them, the most common objective is to post a document produced in Microsoft Word, or perhaps Corel WordPerfect, on the web.
Word documents can be posted directly on the web. However, this is not a good idea. Only users that have Word on their systems can use them - Word is an expensive piece of software, and many people do not have it. (If you really need to do this, there is a free Word Viewer package available from Microsoft that lets people read, but not edit, Word documents.)
Both Word and WordPerfect can convert their documents to HTML format. However, the results are not very attractive. Furthermore, the "HTML" that is produced often does not follow the accepted standards, and so often does not display properly on many systems.
Perhaps the best option is to use Adobe's PDF format. PDF documents appear on the screen almost exactly as they do on paper. They can be printed, and have various other features that facilitates their use on the web. They also require special software (Adobe's Acrobat Reader - available here), but it is free, and because the format is so popular, most people have it installed on their system already.
The biggget problem with PDF is that it is difficult to generate documents in this format. Here are three possible solutions:
Regardless of how you create the PDF file, once you have it, you can upload it to the web site, and create links to it, just like for any other type of material.
Once you are able to post documents, you have to decide what documents you will post.
Obviously notices about events, news items, etc., should be posted. However, what about committee minutes, and other administrative work? Clearly, confidential material, such as Ministry and Personel minutes, cannot be posted. For other, less sensitive material, decisions must be made. Posting such material can make the work of your committees better known among church members. Perhaps it will attract new volunteers. On the other hand, posting this material can be a lot of work, perhaps for little real benefit. This is an area that you need to consider carefully as your site develops.
Related to this is the question of removing items. Although it is easy to leave things posted "forever," it is probably best to remove stale material in time, so they don't confuse people. Perhaps adopt a policy of removing things after one year, or go though the site annually and purge things that are no longer relevant.
One issue that should be of particular concern to church web sites is "accessibility" - is your site usable by handicapped or disabled users. There are many sources on the web for guidelines in this area. The standard guidelines, as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (the international body responsible for setting most Web standards) are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
From my reading, the single most important thing to be done as to ensure that all images include an "alt" tag. This is a string of text that briefly describes what the image is about. This text is read to blind users who access the web using a text-to-speech translator. Without these strings, "reading" a web page can be very frustrating - images are found, but there is no clue as to whether they are just decorative items, or contain useful content that the reader needs to be aware of.
An important consideration for a church web site is security and safety. Here, I am not talking about security of the web site - protection against hackers, for example - but security and safety for the people identified on the web site. This includes, for example, protection against the spammers and telemarketers that stalk the web. It also includes protection of personal information that may cause problems - for example, protection for those trying to avoid contact with abusive partners.
Unless you have very sophisticated web developers, and a very secure ISP, do not use your web site for collecting valuable information such as credit card numbers, etc. Even the biggest corporations have trouble controlling information of this sort - collecting it is just begging for trouble you do not need.
I recommend that churches generally should not provide "forums" or "chat rooms" or other such interactive services. First, congregations are generally too small for such services to be successful. Second, to whatever extent they are successful, they need to be monitored very closely, to prevent conflict and damage. For some reason, people using such services very easily fall into the trap of saying damaging and hurtful things, things they would never say in other environment. It is very easy to misinterpret a joke or poorly-worded comment, take offense, respond in an ugly way, and start an escalation into a bad place. In my view, the risks that these services can cause is not worth the benefit in this situation.
Photographs are a particularly concern in relation to web sites. It is very tempting to post photographs of church events and avtivities, but you have to be very careful doing so. Canada's privacy laws require that you have explicit permission to post someone's picture. It would be a good idea to draw up a permission form, and get it signed by everyone who appears in any photographs you want to use. Posting children's pictures is especially sensitive - it is probably best not to do that.
The web site should avoid providing personal information about people. Here are some suggestions:
As your web site develops, you need to keep questions of security and safety firmly in mind. You want your web site to be a benefit to the members of your congregation, and never cause harm. Even if information appears innocuous at the time it is posted, remember that information remains on the web for a long time. For example, Google offers "cached" copies of web pages even after they have been deleted from the site where they were posted. The Wayback Machine makes complete copies of web sites as they existed on various dates available indefinitely (intended for academic research purposes). It is best to adopt safe policies, and follow them carefully.
Bad stuff happens. You need to expect it, and be ready. That means - have backups of your site.
I develop all the web sites I manage on my personal computer. Whenever I make a change, I make it locally, check that it is right, then upload the new files to the real web site. As a result, I always have two complete copies of the site, if something goes wrong. If I make a mistake changing something, at worst I can start over by downloading the copy that is still on the web.
I also arrange to have "mirror copies" of my sites downloaded to a backup at least once a week, and keep each backup for several weeks. To do this, I use the (free) Gnu command-line program wget - it is available through this web site. I have set up a scheduled task on a personal system to download a full copy of each web site regularly.
If you have any comments on this documents, or other ideas that could be added to it, please send them to the .