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What should I have on my website?

written by jason.g
Wednesday, February 15, 2006

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Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Creating a Community

I have been asked to help with churches that want a website. When I ask, “What do you want it to say?” I get a puzzled look. “Well, we want events, and a calendar, and, oh, I know, we want pictures, yeah, of the congregation!”

Guy Kawasaki has another great list about building a community. My favorite point is the first one. Create something worth building a community around.

Create something worth building a community around. This is a repeated theme in my writing: the key to evangelism, sales, demoing, and building a community is a great product. Frankly, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop a community from forming even if you tried. By contrast, it’s hard to build a community around crappy, mundane, and mediocre crap no matter how hard you try.

Yes, you should have calendars, events (though I would argue that calendar and events are the same) and pictures of the congregation. But you should also SAY something. It can be sermons, an issue, or a cause, but say something. Make your site work for the gospel, not contribute to the noise already on the web.

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28 Responses to “What should I have on my website?”

  1. Or maybe churches could post the stories (not testimonies!) of real people in their congregations.

    Unbelievers at least aren’t interested in our service schedules, calendars, events, etc. because they don’t plan on attending. They aren’t interested in bios of our staff because they can’t imagine an occasion when they would want to meet them. Etc., etc.

    But if we were to include the stories of real people (and not just a few, but as many stories as we can possibly get), then unbelievers might take notice, especially if the stories had something to do with things they were interested in.

    I agree that the traditional stuff (calendars, bios, etc.) should be there - they just don’t need to be as prominent as we often think they should be.

    Frank Johnson February 15th, 2006 at 4:50 pm