I was talking with a friend today Greta C., who was back visiting friends in Cheltenham from the time when she lived here. She said something like is there any point updating a website that only has 10 to 12 visits a day on average ? Good point I thought, is there ?
What is the benefit of updating a site with an electronic version of the Sunday newssheet , because this is what I have conscientiously done in the last few months ( July 2006 to September 2006 ) ?
I have hoped to have content driven from the people who provide the paper based publicity for the various organisations in the church. I understand that much of this is produced in an electronic format at some point in the leaflet production cycle. If this is the case then with a bit of coaching I thought people will be able to publish to our site www.cambray.org using WordPress as a simple content management system.
This is the point to take stock and think of the reasons for going on down this road as it will be important that it works well for starters. How many people look at the website in the church anyway ? Cambray churchgoers are the people to whom the content would be relevant . An article at http://www.church123.com/church_website_target_audience.htm looks at this in part.
part quote from link above: Your website’s second audience is your existing church members. This group is less important than the first, simply because there is probably little which you can place on the website that they don’t already know, or can’t easily find out from another source. So do provide information relevant to church members, but not at the expense of making the site inaccessible to your main audience of non-churchgoers. Everything you put on your site says something about your church…end quote.
What happens if a church website is left as an electronic brochure ? Well I guess this depends on how and why people arrived at the church website. If it were possible to assess accurately how visitors arrived at the site and why, it would be possible to answer this. I fear that it is not a feasible exercise.
I do know that more than 50% of visitors to www.cambray.org arrived in the past by putting cambray, cambray baptist or the like in www.google.com. I suspect they are people who know about our church but find it easier to type cambray into google and press enter. There would be little point in them going to www.Cambray.org if it were merely a brochure, unless they wanted to print out a map etc for someone else. I did see the child protection page printed out in a vestry ( is that an exclusively churchy word I wonder ?!) so there are viewers of the site. Annecdotal evidence indicates that many people say in the church- including a deacon -that they looked at the site in the early days ( 2001 was the start date ) and only have looked at it more recently because sermons on mp3 format are on there or the they had read that it had had a makeover etc etc .
There are those who I know do look at it the site for what’s on on Sunday bit and the like, especially if they have been away the week before, or not at church. Of course those people could go on a mailing list for the weekly newssheet ( something we don’t do incidently)
There is the facility in WordPress (server installation) to publish posts to the site via email, but the problem is the content of the Sunday newssheet can contain references to people and issues that are better not placed in a public area that the web certainly is. Furthermore I guess there would be the problem of formatting that I constantly have to deal with when I publish the Sunday newssheet via WordPress to the site. I have found a workaround using Puretext by Steve Millar that deals with some of them.
I had planned to have a site for people to test out the web publishing via WordPress to a dummy Cambray church site, but I have encountered database error problems, if a post is modified. The post is modified, but it is not the way to encourage new users.
I have therefore decided to see if I can use a WordPress.com site to train users.
Back the the original question : “Is it worthwhile updating a Church Website regularly ?”
Search engines seem to love new content ( wow do they have emotions as well?-I here you ask !), they love links to a site, they like xhtml sites and dont like ones that try to break their algorithm rules.
A bright shiny new church website is a bit like seed that falls in rocky ground in the Parable of the Sower . It will get a listing to start with but will in all probablility drop down the listings as the search engines realise that it does not have any new content. A Church member who blogs regularly and has links to is or her church website is in effect a bit like the farmer who waters his ground in the parable of the sower, as links to help the website to prosper.
Dodgy analogy perhaps I’ ll think of another one later!!
Evangelism and telling people about Jesus Christ and his good news is our response to the new life God has given us. Blog readers of a church person who blogs are at possibly at least in some way in contact with the author so followed links of this sort are better than arriving at a church site than visitors that really wanted was the Pyramid Rock Festival in Australia not the Pyramid Rock childrens holiday club. These were on in Cheltenham and throughout the UK too in 2006!
God is bigger than our plans. Prayer and faith are really our tools to see people becoming Christians . The Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity who convinces and convicts people of their sin and shortcomings.
I am of the view that it is worth updating a church website regularly, but with the proviso that we must pray for the work of the local church ( that includes the church website ) and its people who are the church, and that we endeavour to see that our lives are consecrated to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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[...] Jim Waters has looked at his church’s website, which is of a similar size to my church’s, and asks the question: ‘is it worthwhile updating a church website regularly?’ His argument is that only a handful of people actually look at the site and the majority of these are church members. In otherwords, they do not find out anything on the church’s website that they do not already know. Jim Waters says that while he posted the bulletin contents online, church members pick a printed copy up on Sunday, so all this information is repeated. [...]