Fr. Basil over at The Orthodox Leader has started a discussion about the merits (and reservations) that are worth considering when designing a website.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart (see here, here, and here). You can also watch a video on making a good parish websites put out by the OCA's Midwest diocese here.
The church website. That a church should have one is all but axiomatic in our current context. This, of course, has happened in a fairly short span of time. As recently as a dozen years ago, most parishes didn’t have one. Now, it is considered far more important than the pages-formerly-known-as-yellow, and a cornerstone of parish outreach activities. As a leadership matter, however, the church website does present a number of challenges that merit consideration. I’ll begin by summarizing the positive elements of the church website. First and foremost, it is cheap. Hosting at a good provider, with sufficient space and bandwidth, can be had for under $100 per year. Nothing else come close to the value one receives for such a paltry price. Secondly, a website is malleable. There is no production deadline for changes in the ad copy. Changes and additions to the parish schedule can be made, and they are instantly visible to the world. Errors (spelling or otherwise) can be corrected immediately, rather than deferred to the next week’s printing.
The web has also become ubiquitous. Most of our readers have access to at least one computer at home or in the office, and ever-growing numbers carry them about on their person, in the form of smartphones. (One immediate consideration, though, is that many church websites look awful when viewed on mobile devices.) This ubiquity and constant accessibility means that a great many people, myself included, have discarded printed phone directories in favor of search engines. In fact, catering to the dwindling minority of parishioners without web access, such as restricting critical information to printed materials instead of email or website, has a perverse result in an era of electronic communication. Namely, it relegates the parish newsletter to “junk mail,” as “real mail” (bills, bank statements, personal communications) is increasingly delivered electronically. The newsletter may be a jewel, but it comes in a pile of material destined for the recycle bin. The prospects for it being read aren’t good...
Complete article here.
The web has also become ubiquitous. Most of our readers have access to at least one computer at home or in the office, and ever-growing numbers carry them about on their person, in the form of smartphones. (One immediate consideration, though, is that many church websites look awful when viewed on mobile devices.) This ubiquity and constant accessibility means that a great many people, myself included, have discarded printed phone directories in favor of search engines. In fact, catering to the dwindling minority of parishioners without web access, such as restricting critical information to printed materials instead of email or website, has a perverse result in an era of electronic communication. Namely, it relegates the parish newsletter to “junk mail,” as “real mail” (bills, bank statements, personal communications) is increasingly delivered electronically. The newsletter may be a jewel, but it comes in a pile of material destined for the recycle bin. The prospects for it being read aren’t good...
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We certainly need good parish websites. Far too many look like they were made in the early 1990's. And dare I say it, while I appreciate the idea of the several Orthodox plug-n-play hosting companies that are out there, many Orthodox parish websites look mirror images of the next one.
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