Church Website Design Q&A with Matt Heerema

Matt Heerema, a Web designer at AOL’s Weblogs Inc. who also designs on the side at Direct Steps, designed The Rock at Iowa State University’s site, a truly rockin’ site (pun intended). He filled out my online form and I’ve enjoyed meeting him over email!

Here’s his answers:

How did your current web design come about?

They hadn’t had a redesign in about four years. It was very cutting edge at the the time it was built, but had stagnated badly. The old site completely ignored the rich blogging community that existed in our church, and traffic trickled to a halt, diverting instead to the blogs of individual members and sites that aggregated these blogs, thus rendering the old site ineffective as a means of communicating with our membership. The redesign came about as a desire to re-collect that traffic and provide a central point of communication/information distribution.

Who was involved in the design?

Myself, and a few others that I gathered as an advisory team to help balance my biases and prefereces.

Who manages it now? How?

A small team manages the content on the site. One person manages the events, another is in charge of the sermon podcast, several are in charge of news and announcements on the site’s blog, and a few others are in charge of keeping the graphic advertisement banners up-to-date.

What is your goal or purpose for your web site?

The purpose is to provide a central point of news, announcements, photos, and other information from and for the membership.

What should web sites accomplish for churches?

Church Web sites need to state very clearly what you are about, when and where you meet (large group and small group), and additionally provide resources for the current membership.

What trends do you see in church design?

The obvious trends are podcasting of sermons, and pastor/staff blogs. I also see an overall rise in quality of church site design. There are a lot of churches that are starting to “get it”.

Any advice for other churches? Or other thoughts?

Churches need to embrace the social networking trends. Figure out a way to leverage myspace, facebook, blogs, and podcasting. Providing your membership with a space where the information that is being created by them (photos, blogs, art, etc…) will keep them coming to your site, which allows you to use it as a platform for distributing information. Also don’t forget the necessity of multiple, simultaneous, modes of communicating information. Post it on your Web site, send it out as an e-mail update, and mail out hard copies.

[Thanks, Matt, I appreciate your input!]

Read all the previous Q&As in the Building Rockin’ Church Websites here.