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!

I like logos, and I certainly like church. I design church logos, in fact. So as I’ve sought inspiration by looking at other church logos, I’ve run across a lot of church “logos” about which I’d have to say, Jesus would not do this! So I thought I’d give some “subtle” advice in the way of some tips and tricks, beginning with what NOT to do… I mean never!!

Photos aren’t logos.

Don’t put a photo behind your church name. It’s a photo and a photo isn’t a logo. It doesn’t belong in a logo. It doesn’t stretch like a logo, feel like a logo, or smell like a logo. No photos!

If you have to use a photo, which you should never do, don’t use a photo of your church sign. Sure it’s pretty, but it’s a sign. No one cares. Instead, find a nice, pretty, flower-covered photo of your church cemetary. That will show everyone your church is alive!

Comic Sans is for comics.

Choose your typefaces wisely, and let’s just go ahead and rule out comic sans and anything like it, even if you advertise in the comics section.

Use doves, flames, flags, crosses, and globes sparingly, if at all.

I have a few logos to boast of that incorporate crosses or globes, but these five images are terribly abused and over-used. Nobody outside of Christianity has a clue what the dove means. Flags alienate people who don’t carry the ones you display. Flames can mean passion, but they can also mean other things. Crosses are ancient electric chairs, instruments of cruel execution. Don’t gold-plate them. And globes are okay, they’re just everywhere.

Don’t animate anything.

Crosses don’t spin. Flames don’t look like flames when crackling on a computer screen. And please, please, don’t let any images bleed on your web page. Besides, seems like I read somewhere that crosses and flames are overdone.

Avoid clipart.

Clipart has its place – right next to the comic sans font. It was an 80′s thing, like shell necklaces.

Look at great inspiration.

Look here… please!

Top 33 Church Logos

Church Logos by Jeff Fisher

Creattica’s Logo Gallery (Church logos)

Have You Seen Any Good Church Logos?

I thought it was very cool not only to read Lauren Hunter’s article about me and the Ministry Theme, but then to see the finished product of Lauren’s writing appear in a magazine. You can download the article about using web sites for ministry over at Church & Worship Technology. Cool!

Update: The Ministry Theme was initially intended to be a theme for purchase, but because of the swirling debate surrounding commercially licensed WordPress themes, I’m attempting to remain above reproach. You may donate below, but the theme and all code is now licensed as GPL.

The Ministry Theme has been a LONG time in the making. It’s a premium WordPress theme designed with churches and ministries in mind. The support site, www.ministrytheme.com, will be launched very soon, but you can go ahead and pick up a copy now! The theme features…

• A clean, but easily skinnable, light design.
• Custom home, archives, and links pages.
• Tabbed sidebars (that degrade in IE6).
• A DHTML menu that follows your page structure.
• Front page post thumbnails.
• A widgetized sidebar.
• WordPress 2.6 ready with image and caption styling.
• Gravatar/avatar support in the comments section.

I’ll soon be opening up a forum for support, but for now you can contact me with questions or support requests. Please note that I’m available for support and will offer tutorials publicly soon, but customizations will be handled on a quote-per-hour basis.

Check out the DEMO!

Visit www.ministrytheme.com to Download the Theme. (Downloading of the Ministry Theme has been temporarily disabled while I enhance and improve it for its next release, due in late February 2009.

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!