Nov

Church Web Site Design Q&A with West Ridge Church’s Aaron Reimann

Continuing in the Building Rockin’ Church Web Sites series, Aaron Reimann, network administrator for West Ridge Church in Dallas, Ga., answered my church Web site design questions.Here’s the Q&A:

1. How did your current web design come about?
We did a few comps with in Illustrator, passed the ideas around to three people, and picked the best.

2. Who was involved in the design?
Overall, the IT guy (me), one of the designers (does all church-wide graphics), and the executive pastor. We have 30 on staff, we can’t have everyone’s opinion, or it wouldn’t get done.

3. Who manages it now? How?

A friend and I wrote an administration backend using PHP and PostgreSQL. It manages Events, News, Sermon Uploads (which also generates the Podcast feed), Staff photos and bios, etc. I also have implemented Contribute for some other features.

4. What is your goal or purpose for your web site?

This is a debate that all churches have, and there isn’t a right or wrong answer. Even in our church there are different opinions. My goal is to give people access to see what are church is like, and make it where people can hear our music, and sermons.

5. What should web sites accomplish or do for churches?

Similar question, similar answer.

6. What do you see the future holding for church web sites?

Trends… For our church, we will have more multimedia, video, etc.

7. Any advice for other churches seeking to design/redesign their sites?

For 7, I must say, this is my opinion, not the churches. I have been doing web design/development since ’96, so I have developed a lot of opinions throughout the years.

A. Flash “technology” is expensive. If you don’t have someone on staff that has the time to develop it in Flash, and maintain it, don’t go that route. It will affect you in the long run.

B. Pick someone that knows his/her stuff. Don’t pick someone just because they are a member of your church. If you don’t know how to tell the difference some that knows his stuff, contact other churches, see what they think.

C. Don’t use Frontpage for anything, ever.

D. Get a contact management system, or write one. I prefer to write my own, I have CMS’s in about 5 or 6 churches. It’s nice to not require a full-time person to manage the whole site.

E. Don’t get someone that only knows print to do the site. You need someone that knows how to size things correctly.

F. Don’t post your email addresses on your site. Write a script that links a name to the database and deliver the mail that way. It’s simple whether it be ASP, .NET, PHP, whatever.

G. Keep it simple.

H. Pick a current and popular programming language. For example, Cold Fusion and Java are dead. Something like Django, Symfony, etc, are very nice, but too cutting edge, and very few people use them. So you don’t want to get stuck with a technology that is great, but only one person you no of uses it. Use something like PHP, .NET, maybe Ruby.

I. Love your site, change it. Don’t have the same look and feel for three years.

J. Budget money for your site. You need too.

8. Other thoughts, ideas, ramblings appreciated too …

I also manage our computers, servers, etc. I could give you a ton of opinions on how not to do stuff.