When I set up hosting for a design client, the hosting package comes with plenty of email power, but nothing can really top Gmail for email purposes. Some argue that putting all of your eggs into the Google basket is a bad idea. I feel otherwise. Google Apps has offered up one of the nicest set of small business tools available anywhere. Our church even uses Google Apps to manage multiple calendars, store documents for the staff, and route emails.

The best part of it all is that Google Apps is domain-brandable. So my church email address is brandon@bethelbentonville.com but it’s actually powered by Gmail and therefore gets me tons of storage, highly searchable and taggable email, and the awesome Gmail user interface. We can keep a facilities and events calendar for the organization and we can each have our own calendars to share with one another. It’s all collaborative magic!

Mashable.com just published a post detailing how small businesses can use Google Apps. I highly recommend that if you aren’t totally satisfied with your non-google-apps-email-and-calendar solution, check it out.

Probably a lot more! You probably should know that this article is inspired by three different interactions. One, reading Niki Brown’s article, Why Logos Should Cost More Than $300. Two, reading Jacob Cass’ Why logo design does not cost $5. Third, a common question I hear from Pastors, “how do I convince my church to spend money on a website when they don’t see the need?

So leaders, I’m going to attempt to give you some viable and truthful information about why a church should invest money in a church website…

To Honor God

Your building and grounds, bulletin shells, and website should all be done with exellence, fit for the King! Simple enough.

To Communicate the Gospel

A web site is another platform from which to spread the message of eternal life. I don’t think you should see your website as “just one more tool,” but that’s probably best left for a future post.

To Connect with the Public

You might still use a phone book, but most people under 30… no wait, 40 don’t. We use Google… or Bing… or Local, Ask, Dogpile (don’t ask) or something similar. The closest we get to the yellow pages is Google-411 or Anywho.com. So when John, Jane, and their kids Johnny, Jr., Jimmy, and Jasmin move to your town, they’re going to search for “churches in anytown, usa.” You might want to be there to meet them.

At Bethel, about 70% of the people who walk through our doors saw our website before coming!

To Provide Information About Your Church

Service times, maps, events, ministries offered, staff and leadership – all are common ingredients of church websites, and they should be. You’re telling everyone who you are.

Wait… our question wasn’t just “why do we need a website,” but “why do we need a good website, that costs money?” Well, here then…

Your Website Should Reflect Your Church’s Story and Personality

Please, please don’t use the template and space that comes with your home ISP account. Let me make this simple – your pastoral business card, church sign, bulletin, and website should all have a common theme – a brand if you will.

Your Website Should Encompass a Well-planned Usability Strategy

A page with a bunch of links and text worked great way back in the 90′s, but that was a previous century! A professional designer will understand your website from the perspective of a user, a visitor. The flow of information will be user-centric. You’ve got to think through your online communication strategy.

Your Website Should Look Good

Plain and simple – your church website shouldn’t stink. It should really look great, like these.

What Should A Website Cost?

Impossible to answer here. Why? Because there are a variety of needs, a variety of solutions, and a variety of approaches taken by a variety of designers. Personally, I’d be wary of anyone charging less than $750 – 1,000 for a complete site solution. I’d also probably avoid anyone charing more than a few thousand dollars, unless they’re really creating some awesome applications for you from scratch. So, anywhere from $750 – $5,000 depending on a range of factors.

Rather than look for a particular price, keep these points in mind…

• Find a designer you can trust based on references, previous work, and the evidence of strong ethics.
• Don’t be cheap. You’re paying for creativity and art, not a mass-produced commodity.
• Don’t be extravagant. It’s God’s money (all of it) so be a wise steward, but don’t be cheap…
• Form a relationship with your designer so that he can perform future work for you with a growing understanding of your vision and values.
• Value a designer’s work as a contribution to the honor and glory of God.

They’re Still Not Convinced

I’ve been there. In fact, eGrace Creative exists today because I felt a $2,500 price tag would shock some of my congregational leaders into immediate cardiac arrest. So I started playing around with web creation software. That was 1998 and the rest is history. I’ve been helping churches since then. So my next post along these lines is going to be quite the opposite sentiment… How Can My Church Have a Nice Website for Less than $100 (They’re Too Cheap To Spend More)

I love the ministry philosophy of Jack Graham, “Excellence in all things, and all things to the glory of God.” Today, Seth Godin hammers this truth home in his blog entitled The problem with non. His point? Nonprofits are usually too timid to be excellent enough to compete.

I sometimes become frustrated with the ministry approach to technology and design. “But we’re a church, shouldn’t it all be free or really, really cheap?” I believe in helping ministries and nonprofits in these areas, but we sometimes fail to value that which costs us nothing.

I can see a striking difference between nonprofits that show up to compete and those who don’t. You can tell when a church senses a call to excellence. They do things differently. They do things well.

Here’s the bottom line – get over the “poor us, it’s so tough to be a nonprofit organization, we’ll just have to beg” attitude and start striving, pushing, driving, and achieving. Excellence matters and certainly your cause is worth it, right? I wonder if you lead in a way that tells everyone else how worthy it is?

And a bonus – here are some great tips for designing a nonprofit website!

One Marketing genius you should probably know about is David Tonen. He’s a great thinker and creative leader and posts great thoughts about church marketing practices. Here’s a great thought from today’s post…

Church: Invest In Your Logo (Don’t “Cheap Out”)

Here’s a quick tip – be human. One thing I’ve learned from Twitter is that people follow people and they “unfollow” spam. In fact, spam is detested in the twittersphere about as badly as it is in the email world. When advising companies about the use of Twitter, I always recommend letting one of the heads of the company tweet personally rather than just giving “company news.” This allows you to offer something back to the community rather than just be a taker.

This is a pretty important lesson social media has to teach medium and large companies – be a face, be a voice, and talk back. What do Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, and Darren Rowse all have in common? They all love twitter and converse with their “followers.” This is also true of Karl Rove and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s even a tiny part of why Barack Obama won the hearts of the tech generation.

This post isn’t really all about Twitter (that post is coming next week). Instead, it’s a message about business, ministry, marketing, and people. People follow people. They don’t follow “company news,” “latest deals,” or press releases about new products. So how do you become human to your potential “followers” in today’s economy?

• Contribute – don’t be a taker.
• Have a face, not just a logo.
• Have a real name, like Bob, Tom, or Julio, not just “Gargantuan Enterprises, LLC.”
• Admit mistakes, answer criticism (sometimes), and be imperfect.
• Be a friend in the same way you’re a friend to your friends, if you really want new friends.
• Be careful about anything “automated” or “mass.” Think “personal response.”
• Use smileys. :-) and ;-) can make a somewhat argumentative statement more palatable. :-)

And the biggest lesson of all? Love people or get a job at a zoo. Here’s more about me. Want me to know about you and your message? Introduce yourself in the comments below – I promise to personally respond!

I appreciate reading the blog of Seth Godin (along with half the world, apparently). Today, he blogged about the fact that “small is a weapon, not an excuse” and spoke of the power of the web to level the playing field between small and large businesses. I couldn’t agree more.

I serve as the Pastor of a church, which I consider small (we average about 200 people in our Sunday morning service). I know “small” is relative in almost any field, but in this day of megachurches, we’re small. But I’m also a firm believer that small churches and ministries can sometimes do things that larger ones can’t. Sometimes it’s red tape, other times its intimacy, but there are often huge advantages to being small.

Don’t get me wrong, many churches are being unfaithful to the spread of the gospel because they celebrate smallness in all the wrong ways – they’ve become isolated from culture, are dying, and are oblivious to it because they keep celebrating the wrong kind of smallness. Nonetheless, smallness can still have its advantages.

Seth points out that your small business can have a better web site, blog, newsletter, customer service, etc. than many larger businesses. This is true. There’s a reason why Get Human is such a popular place – people hate automated answering systems and maze-like navigational menus when they encounter a customer service issue. They just want a face, a voice, a reassurance that they matter – something that large businesses struggle to capture.

So how do you do business better when your small? It’s a comprehensive subject, so I’ll just focus a few thoughts on how your web site can help you beat out the bigger competition…

1. You can have a nicely designed site. Okay, so can the big guys, but many don’t. While their developers have to account for a thousand unique issues related to the size of their organization, you can focus on a simple site with a killer look!

2. You can respond personally to pleas for help. Your site can feature a contact form to which you pesonally respond. I’m not a fan of auto responders because no matter how wisely they are crafted, they always seem… auto? Nobody wants to be answered by a computer.

3. You can develop a relationship with your clients. This is the age of social networking, not just for individuals, but for businesses too. The idea of customer loyalty was beginning to die a slow death in this supercenter age, but it’s returning as people follow the service and goods providers they love best online.

4. You can easily communicate about what’s happening behind the scenes. I always recommend that every organization with a web site post company news of some kind, even if it’s “Kate got a new desk…” Why? Because nobody likes to do business with invisible people, so open the blinds online, let folks know that you’re human.

5. You can do it all fairly inexpensively. Some of you can do all of this yourself for nearly free, but even if you hire a professional web developer, rent a server, and do some online marketing, you’re investing a few thousand dollars that will pay for itself in a relatively short time period. The internet offers some of today’s greatest advertising opportunities and this will only increase as more people in more areas get better access to the online world.

So I agree with Seth, small is not an excuse, it can actually be a weapon. Fire away!

I began doing freelance web site design primarily because of a tremendous lacking of high quality web sites among today’s churches. For most churches, maintaining a web site seems a trifle luxury, but I see it as a necessity. Even still, I’ll admit that many churches with web sites really shouldn’t have… After perusing most of the internet (that’s an exaggeration) to see as many church web sites as possible, I’ve put together a little list of my greatest church web site pet peaves.

1. Animated GIF’s. Sure they’re free. And yes, you grew up scotch-taping cut out clipart to the weekly bulletin shell before cranking out mimeographs for Sunday’s service. But clip art, in the traditional sense, is now out of date. As Agent J would put it, it’s “old and busted!” You don’t need any spinning crosses, blinking crosses, or even bleeding crosses (oh yeah, they’re out there…). You don’t have a spinning cross on top of your steeple do you? (My apologies to you if you do…). Give up the clipart books and welcome to the world of vector art!

2. Tiled, repeating backgrounds. Especially those that remain fixed while the non-contrasting text is left to flow in front, unnoticed. Here’s a great tip. Look at your church’s front page in grayscale. If you can’t read the dark gray text against the slightly less gray photographic background, neither can many of your site’s visitors.

3. Banner exchanges. They’re so early 90′s! A few church web sites feature their basic contact information, then eleven printable pages of banners from all of their favorite sister ministries. (And all of these banners use animated gif’s!). The evil cousin of banner exchanges is the always broken webring! Just don’t go there.

4. Boring pictures. Pictures are okay, but don’t choose that nice spring photo of your church’s hillside cemetary as the welcome page background. Almost as bad is a picture of the lonely church sign. Why not feature some flesh-and-blood human beings, a nice picture of the building you want visitors to find, or leave the graphics out altogether?

5. Cool stuff. You know what I mean… you drag the mouse across the page and it makes little watery, ripply things. Or each click produces a chain reaction of domino-like flash features designed to dazzle and impress. Here’s the problem, nobody really cares. Sure you can do it, but that doesn’t mean it produces mature disciples or reaches seekers for Christ. I like smooth effects, but all effects, graphics, and special tools should merely serve to enhance your content, which is where the real heart of a church web site should lie.

6. Outdated content. This is the age of the RSS feed, the blog, and the social-networking revolution, which opens up a world of possibilities for displaying fresh and relevant content for your people. If the last article on your church web site announced the upcoming Y2K-preparedness conference in the fellowship hall, you need a web-savvy secretary!

7. Free sites. I’m not talking about churches that receive a custom design for no cost. I’m talking about all of those content networks that offer you a domain name like http://www.somefreecontentnetworksite.com/~?p42/directory/your-church-name-somewhere-at-the-end. If you don’t want to have to issue an advertising disclaimer like “We know you might see nasty stuff on our page, but we didn’t put it there…” then don’t sign up for a freely hosted site.

8. Fun fonts. Typography is, in my opinion, just as important as any graphic presentation of your church web site. Comic Sans has somehow made its way onto the list of top twenty or so web fonts. Why? I have no idea. Reserve all the fun, bubbly, flowery, pseudo-cursive stuff for your church scrapbook club. This is the internet and it’s meant to be read.

I hope that I wasn’t too hard on you, but our age is one sorely lacking in proper church web site discipline. We need a clarion call for proper church web presentation and decorum. So here are a few suggestions if you’ve just self-diagnosed your church as out of good standing with the web…

1. Spend money on online outreach. Isn’t it cruel to expect a church to shell out money for a web site? We are non profit, right? You’ve noticed the difference, I’m sure, between the teenager who mowed lawns for five years to buy that first clunker versus the spoiled kid who got the free Camaro, right? We appreicate what we pay for. And besides, aren’t your people tithing to fulfill the great commission, to reach people? And aren’t people gathering online?

2. Be thou clean! Give a little space, some padding, some margin, some room for the eyes to cascade downward through your awesome sermon manuscript. Don’t over-design just because you can. Keep it simple. Look at Google. Look at the iPod. Fancy graphics are out the window – they’re “old and busted.”

3. Focus on content. That’s all your church web site really needs. A church site can serve one of several purposes, but these are probably at the top of the list: to communicate the gospel, to announce church events, to celebrate victories, to tell great stories, to convey God’s message. All of these are carried on the wings of words, so write and keep writing. That’s actually all your church web site really needs anyway. When it comes to content, go and thin no more!

I’m sure there’s more to share, but I thought I’d close by offering a few of my favorite church web sites, none of which were designed by me. Notice the cleanliness, the content, and the nice and friendly user interface. If I were looking for a church, I might even visit one myself…

Bethlehem Baptist, Minneapolis (I’m not crazy about Calvinism, but this is one of the best sites out there!)

The City Church (in spite of some slightly small fonts)

Stonebriar Community Church (okay, graphics can be good)

LifeChurch.tv (edgy techniques, but awesome interactivity)

Eastpoint (again, nice graphics)

Need Help?

I’d be happy to help, whether that means pointing you to some good resources, offering a free consultation, or designing your site from the ground up. Drop me a line today!

I was listening recently to a well-known Baptist Pastor who asserted that “these bloggers” were overly critical of his ministry. Blogging Pastors have been blamed for a lot of stuff they really haven’t been responsible for. Important issues do have to be raised, however, when handling the responsibility of blogging.

First, let me offer my own definition of what blogging is all about. For many, it seems like an over-used, trendy buzz word designed to communicate that a guy is “with it” and connected to the postmodernized web 2.0 world. If that’s you, more power to you. As a blogging Pastor myself, I define it differently. For me, blogging is writing to the world at large. Period.

One of the areas of web design I am most keenly interested in is blog design, particularly for corporate entities, churches, and other nonprofit organizations. Add to that that I’m a blogging Pastor myself (www.brandonacox.com), and you can probably understand the positive nature of my reflections on this subject. So here are my thoughts…

Practical Uses of Pastoral Blogging

There are some great blogging platforms available today. My own favorite is WordPress. Like most others, WordPress offers some functionality that allows Pastors and churches to offer a diversity of dynamic content on their site while knowing very little about web programming or development. Let me define some basic helpful terms before going into detail.

Categories are used to categorize different types of articles. They have other uses as well, but the benefits of categorizing content are manifold. First, you can list all categories in a menu so that people can browse articles under these general subject headings. Second, each category, for WordPress at least, generates a separate feed. Coupled with some other tools, you can use a single category in different ways.

Tags are kind of like categories, but are usually utilized a little more loosely. When I write an article on my blog, I quickly think of the four or five most relevant words related in the article and I list them as tags for the article. This helps with various search functions and also enables the use of a “tag cloud” that lists my topics in a cloud format with the most-written-about being the boldest in the list.

Timestamp refers to the time an article was posted. The usefulness of the timestamp is that, for WordPress at least, posts with timestamps in the future will not appear on the site until their timestamp has arrived. So for daily devotionals, you can “stack up” your articles in advance and trust that they will post at the appropriate time.

Now on to that list of practical uses of pastoral blogging…

Use a blogging platform for prayer requests. Be careful with online prayer lists. It’s great to inform people of needs, but make sure you are respecting all privacy issues, written and otherwise. Don’t post medical status’ unless you are cleared to do so by the individual or family members. Should you use blogging for prayer requests, make the title the request and use the post body for details. Then, include the rss feed or category widget in your sidebar.

Use a blogging platform for posting sermon notes. Within my church, we use WordPress not only for sermon notes, but also for podcasting audio recordings from Sunday’s sermons (www.biblejourney.org). Be brave and post them before Sunday, or simply allow them to remain on your site as an archive.

Use a blogging platform as photo album. You’ll need to know a little something about plugins to make this nice, but you can style your photos to display inline with pretty borders and use something like a lightbox script to make a nice-looking popup for each image. This is what I’ve done with my portfolio.

Use a blogging platform to reflect and inspire. I think this can definitely be overdone. Don’t become so infatuated with your own opinions that you try to become the “Dear Abby” of the Christian web. Nonetheless, your people want to know what you think about all kinds of issues. When someone else is challenging the historical Jesus, the historicity of Noah’s ark, or is introducing a new cult, you have the opportunity to express your beliefs to your people… by blogging.

Use a blogging platform as a daily devotional. I began doing this through DailyBibleJourney.org but the project became quickly overwhelming because of my schedule. After trips to Missouri, Kentucky, and central Arkansas, and staring down trips to Texas and even Russia, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to be as consistent as I’d hoped. So heed the warning, work ahead if you go down this road. It’s an extremely rewarding exercise for both you and the people whom you lead.

Use a blogging platform to publish “news” about your church. People who are considering attending your church would like to know that actual human beings go there and that they interact on some kind of regular basis like a spiritual family. So use a blogging platform to convey notes about what’s been happening in addition to what’s upcoming.

Don’t be afraid to blog – just do it responsibly. The worst thing you can do is hide behind the anonymity of the internet and hurl insults and accusations at fellow leaders over minor disagreements. It’s rather unfair to attack a colleague when he or she cannot practically offer any rebuttal. There may be times you’ll need to expose error, but be careful about offending others online – it’s kind of a cheap shot.

The internet can be a rather dark place, spiritually speaking. If God has called you to speak to the world on His behalf, why not include the world wide web? You Pastors have been called to communicate, to write, to speak, and to think out loud. So use the technology at your fingertips and publish, blog, and preach electronically! And if you need help getting started or with a custom blog or church web site design, I’m here to help!