Torture Beyond Potato Peeling: Keeping the Church Website Consistently Updated

"I don't know why we even have a website, its not like anyone ever goes on it." One of the saddest states of affairs in today's church reality is that it really is hard to justify spending $100 or more on a website that seems to produce very little benefit. With many churches having a hard time trying to maintain the salaries of the current church staff, building maintenance and upkeep, and ministry development to the community at large, there is very little dollar signs left for unproductive expenses. As a youth pastor at one faith community, I was told that if some concept/event doesn't work then scrap it and move on. There is very little time or money for beating a useless dead horse when we are not racing horses but raising cattle. This is also the thought of many communities when it comes to their website. Little to no membership growth are due from it and the only site visitors are search engine spiders and spammers.

While there are many unsatisfied churches on the web, they didn't and many don't think this way before purchasing an exit on the information superhighway. There is an amazing sense of awe from churches who are looking into this investment. They hear of stories (many lies) about how this or that church gained thousands of people just by adding a space, but they don't understand that most sites simply become an expensive yellowpages advertisement. After the quick realization that Jesus not the internet is their saviour, then they are left with the question of what to do with this giant bill known as a website. Slowly the presence goes from being updated weekly/daily to maybe a month after an major event such as the Fall Fest. It becomes a strange experience when one goes onto a website in the middle of July and finds out that he or she can still buy tickets for the Christmas program. Is Christmas really in July?

One of the most painstaking things about website upkeep is keeping new information flowing in and weeding out the old. It would be so much more fun if we just kept working on the design instead of the event calendar. The monotonous work of information maintenance includes much more work than just the event calendar. There is also the church forum, working/dead/new links, news headlines, church bulletin information, staff & member announcements, and the list continues. Just reading the list will make your heart plop to the ground, but this shouldn't bring to much fright. This really isn't too much work, if one finds someone who can spend 1-2 hours a week working on just maintaining information updates for the church website. Even better yet, take it a step forward and give the controls to the entire congregation. Set up a simple form where the church members can submit in new events and take them out as they see fit by a simple click of a link. While doing both of these suggestions will not totally remove all the labor it sure will help cut off a large chunk of it.