Fri Feb 7 10:18:57 PST 2003
I’ve been thinking a lot about the church website recently. Mulling it over in my head, looking at various other sites and site-building tools and thinking about the overall design goals and purpose of the website. The key to a good website (or any communication tool) is to understand your goals and your audience. Once you understand those two, you can use tools (websites, verbal speech, written documents, etc.) to achieve your goals. I’ve attempted to condense my thoughts together and summarize them in a meaningful way. You could say that the goal of this document is to enable me organize my thoughts, ideas and research into a single place.
The church website is currently only focused outward. It contains some limited information about the church that would be helpful to non-members, and more specifically, people who have not attended the church before, but already have some church background. I feel that there are some particularly strong points to the current design and content.
1. Provides basic theological beliefs. Useful for people looking for a
church who already have some church background
2. Provides contact information and directions on how to get to
the church
- Overview of ministries, but nothing specific
- Overview of Sunday services and times, but again, nothing specific
I’d like to suggest that the website can be a much more useful tool for the church in a couple of areas. First, it can be reshaped into a communication tool for the members as well as non-members. Second, it can be developed to provide more useful information to unchurched people. Third, it can grow into an organizational tool for the staff.
There is one issue that often comes up, and that is that not all church members have access to the web, and we don’t want to create a "digital divide" within the church. This is certainly a valid concern. I believe that the key to avoiding such a problem is to ensure that the website mirrors and complements our printed material, instead of attempting to replace it. This is an issue that those who update and support the website will need to keep in mind on a regular basis. Also we can set up one or more systems at the church that could be used to view the church’s website exclusively (making it difficult to abuse). Even very low end systems could be used to do this with minimal cost and effort.
Reshaping the website to be a communication tool with the existing members about church events, news and messages will likely require some substantial restructuring since it changes the primary focus of the site. Also, it requires that people (most likely the staff) add content to the site on a regular basis (I’m thinking 10-20 pieces of information each week to be effective). The key to the site being useful is that it contains up to date information on events, news and messages from the church. Getting this information on the site can be partially automated and made part of the normal flow of work for the staff. I’ll attempt to go more into detail on this later on.
Consider the different kinds of printed material that the church produces on a regular basis, the Sunday and Saturday night programs, the newsletter, announcement letters to groups of people. I think they contain information that can be classified into a couple of categories:
1. Events – Usually upcoming with information about when, where, who,
what and occasionally even why. Also, there is sometimes event
summaries, like when we had the Mexico Mission trip people come back
and show photos of what they were working on and what happened.
These might be classified as news.
Examples of events: Most of the middle sheets in the program, the
calendar in the newsletter, letters sent out to parents of youth
about an upcoming outing. The order of events and the sermon title in
the Sunday morning program.
2. News – Information that isn’t usually tied to an event that people
would likely participate in, and may or may not require any
particular action by the reader.
Examples of news: Family Matters, giving information in the program,
a change in who is on the trustees committee, a request for help in
the nursery on Saturday nights, an update letter from missionaries.
3. Messages – Communication not regarding any particular event. Usually
intended to educate or encourage.
Examples: Pastor’s column on the back of the program, sermons, an
article in the newsletter about how to raise Godly children, the
article about why the elders believe that it’s OK for women to be
ministers. A page describing the purpose of the house and grounds
ministry, or the meaning of worship.
Naturally there are sub-categories to each of these, but I believe that most of the communication of the church can be put into these three broad categories, and that the properties of the information in each of the categories is unique to the category, and the distinctions useful for enabling a discussion of the categories as distinct entities instead of discussing the information at a finer granularity.
As a quick aside, orthogonal to categories like Events, News and Messages there are ‘topics’ like "youth", "missions", "music" that we can group information into to allow people to more easily focus on their interests. For example, I don’t have youth or children, so I generally only skim over any announcements involving youth and children. To enable efficient communication, a mechanism for easily filtering out or highlighting topics of interest would be highly desirable.
Let’s now take a quick look at an implementation of news site to give our imaginations a bit of a kick-start on how other people have organized similar information. The first is http://slashdot.org/ one of the largest ‘geek’ news websites. It’s a pretty busy layout with a lot of information, but down the middle you see the most recent news stories in chronological order, but just the summaries. Clicking on the ‘read more’ link of a story reveals the rest of the story (assuming there is one) and also comments submitted by other readers. Along the sides are boxes with links to other areas of the site including pages that are built with just specific information from a category or a topic (just book reviews, or articles on the topic of space for example). Also, frequent users of the site can set up filters so that they see (or don’t see) particular topics or categories of articles on the site more easily.
Also of interest to us is the behind the scenes activities that go into supporting the site. To do this we need to have some insight into the lifespan of a ‘story’ in the slashdot site. To summarize:
- A user (could be anyone) submits a story
System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 73)
Enumerated list ends without a blank line; unexpected unindent.
2. A site author (restricted to trusted people) edits the story,
assigns it to a category and a topic, and the releases it
3. The story now appears on the front page of the site for a time, it
can now also be commented on by other readers of the site
4. As the story ages, it gets displaced from the front page by newer
stories and moved to the ‘recent news’ section where only the
title appears
5. After getting displaced from ‘recent news’ it can still be
found through the search engine, or other links that people set
up manually.
6. After a specified period of time, new comments are not allowed and
the story is ‘archived’ meaning that all the information is kept,
but no new comments can be made to the story.
The slashdot site does an excellent job of handling News items, but in other areas of interest for us, Events and Messages it doesn’t do as well, since it wasn’t designed to support those categories of information. I think that Messages can be handled in a similar manner to News, but we need to archive them differently than News since the usefulness of Messages is not as limited in time as News items are. A Message may be useful and important for many years, where a News item may only hold vague historical significance after a month or even week.
Events are a more rich data type. They contain not only basic text like News or Messages interspersed with possibly a few images, but information about a date, time and location that users will want to search or sort based on those values, so they must be made explicit to the underlying software to enable such searching and ordering. For example, providing a list of events in the order that they were submitted to the system isn’t particularly useful to the users. At a minimum they want to seem them in the order that they will (or did) occur, and preferably in a format that they are familiar with, like a month view with the events inserted on the correct days or perhaps a week view. This was already attempted on the current website, but because it is usually not up to date with reality, it isn’t useful to people.
Events have a dual nature. First they inform people of an upcoming event, and after the event is past, they can inform people of what happened at the event. By modifying the flow of a story in Slashdot to include multiple editing steps to add information (like pictures, additional text, lists of people in attendance, etc.) the dual nature of Events should be supportable, and the creation of an alternative view (a calendar view) would provide a clear and recognizable interface for users to navigate.
So we still haven’t addressed the fundamental issue of how to provide current, regular updates of information to the website. If the website isn’t kept up to date with a sizable amount of useful content, it won’t be useful. It’s a kind of ‘critical mass’ problem. I believe that the key to keeping the content up to date is to make it part of the normal working behavior of the people generating the content, which is usually the staff. And the key to enabling the staff to get the content on the website is to integrate it as part of their normal working behavior. This is probably the most difficult problem to solve for any website.
Let’s take one example of how this might work (Note: I’m making some big assumptions about how the staff and office works. A more careful analysis should be made before implementing anything).
Each week James writes a column for the back of the program. He writes
it in his favorite editor (probably MS Word) and then emails it to
Laurie to be included in the Sunday morning program. She cut-n’-pastes
it into the space reserved on the back of the program, cleans up the
layout and fonts and then prints the program which people read and
then recycle.
Now let’s change the flow just a little:
James writes the program in his favorite editor (most editors should
work) then uploads or exports the text to a web form, fills in a few
fields like Category and Topic and publishes it on the web. He then
emails the link to Laurie who cut-n’-pastes the text from the web into
the program and does the formatting and printing…
By inserting a fairly minor change, we got the information on the web where it is now visible by a wider audience (people who missed the service, lost their program, or maybe haven’t ever been to our church), it could be commented on by readers more easily (if we want that feature) and it is archived in a known, searchable location which can be useful for both members and staff to use for reference (e.g. Do you remember James’ column from last month about caring for others?).
So the basic theory is that most of this stuff needs to be typed into a computer anyway. By doing a very small amount of additional (or more structured or specific) work, it can be then transformed by programs to be externally visible and archived, leveraging the existing work for larger benefits.
So I’ve talked a lot about providing up to date information that will make the site more useful for members, how to organize that information and how to get the content to the site as part of existing workflows. There are other usage models for the website that I believe are worthy of attention, but would inherently be helped by solutions in this first area.
Making the website more useful for the unchurched is an area that I think the current site isn’t particularly good at. Most of the information is really more oriented at someone who knows who Jesus is and what a Church service is like. Also the information is rarely specific about what we do and what we care about. Now if we start implementing something like the ‘Events, News and Messages’ concept above, we can create a section of Messages that talk about what Christianity is about, what the Church is for, and similar topics. A visitor to the site could also start to get a feel for the Church activities by looking at the Events and what the Church cares about by looking at the News articles.
Basically, if done well, we expose the activities, concerns, dialog, and inner workings of the Church to the rest of the world for them to see what we are all about. If we are who we claim to be, they should see Jesus by seeing who we are and what we do.
The website can also be a useful tool for the staff by providing a framework for organizing and archiving information. Clearly the church needs a unified calendar for keeping track of all the major activities from all the ministries. Currently it’s kept on a giant poster in the office. But if that calendar was moved online, it would be easier to maintain, and also easier to take places (just print a copy, or connect to the website).
Additional tools could be developed to reserve resources to help ensure that the vans or rooms in the church aren’t double-booked. Or attach attendance lists to Events (but hide them from non-staff website viewers) to better track who is showing up to various activities. The idea is that if you can think of something that you want to track or automate, it is likely it can be integrated into this process to help you spend less time in the office and more time out in the field working with people.
As an archive tool, such a website could be very valuable for looking up information on various previous events since they would be archived. For example you could check the sermon title, or list of songs from the previous year’s Easter service to remember things that worked, or didn’t work. Uploading photos and attaching them to events could provide a searchable repository of digital photos with wide-ranging uses.
I’ve discussed a lot of wide-ranging uses and suggested some fairly major changes to the status quo. What we also need to keep in mind is how changes like this will help people grow closer to God, and at what cost. If there are other activities that will help more at lower cost, then we should pursue those opportunities instead of going down these paths.
Some example sites (of style and structure, not content)
http://www.slashdot.org/ — example of a very dynamic and well-organized story-based news site.
http://www.lottadot.com/calleria.pl?month=1&year=2003§ion= — An example of a calendar built as an addon to slash.
http://www.wildfaith.org/ — slash-based site for "peace" with great graphic design and a more static layout than most slash sites. Their events page appears messy and poorly laid out.
