Web Design in Oklahoma City

I was reading a recent series of articles on Church Marketing Sucks entitled "Best Practices for Internet Ministry." Now, we do a lot of work with churches and we have a church website design product called Sky, so I'm always interested in information about websites for ministry. At the same, I started thinking that most of the issues being discussed here would actually apply to any website, not just a ministry website. So, even if you're not a ministry, please read on.

The article outlines the findings of a research study conducted by David Bourgeois. He surveyed over 240 ministries, including 88 churches. He crafted questions to determine the degree to which ministries and churches felt their website was successful and then cross-referenced that information with other questions in order to draw conclusions about what factors led to a successful web ministry.

His three recommended best practices are outlined in three separate articles, as follows:

1. A successful internet ministry has a deliberate planning process
2. A successful internet ministry does not rely exclusively on volunteers to create or maintain their web site
3. A successful internet ministry carefully decentralizes the responsibility for updating content

Certainly, at the very least, conclusions #1 and #3 could easily apply to any organization, not just churches and ministries. So, whether you are a church, a business, a non-profit, or any organization, I recommend checking out the findings here and seeing how they might apply to your own web presence.

I'd also like to draw attention to #3 -- decentralizing the responsibility for updating content. This is obviously something we believe in because this concept is at the core of any content management system. An easy-to-use CMS makes it possible for multiple people to update and add content onto a website with no coding skills. It's the reason why we build our client websites onto our own CMS and why we are so passionate about making our CMS available to our network of LightCMS resellers as well.

Finally, as a part of point #3, his article pointed out that there was a high correlation between successful websites and websites containing blogs. I have posted many times on this blog about the value of blogging (see here, here, here and here for examples) and my belief in it only grows stronger by the day. In my opinion, blogging is the single greatest tool available to the business owner or ministry leader for building the quality of their website.  This new research gives some additional credence to the idea that blogging on your website improves your probability of success.

Take a look at the articles and let us know what you think.