Church Website: Effective?

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I don’t know if there has ever been a thread on this subject, or if this is the right place to post such a thread, but I was wondering how effective is the website of your parish. Ours was just revamped. It is so much easier to navigate, and has so many helpful features that I think it has become a real aid to the parish ministry. Here it is:
oursaviournyc.org/
 
Not bad.

But I like to see a mission statement, and objectives. Let’s me see if they are obedient to Rome or to the “sprit of Vatician II”.
 
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Trelow:
Not bad.

But I like to see a mission statement, and objectives. Let’s me see if they are obedient to Rome or to the “sprit of Vatician II”.
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LOL! Spot on!
I think there should be a website that is a BBB of parishes.
Catholic Communities or Catholic Churches, that sort of thing.
 
Considering the average age of the parishioners and computer literacy of the people of this parish, a parish website would be useful and accessible to approximately .0002% of the Catholics here.

The development of such a website has apparently been assigned a correspondingly low priority.
 
I would love for our parish website to be better, they say they’re working on a new version to be in place by this summer, for now it’s down though. I have tons of ideas of things they could post there, that would be very helpful.
 
At the moment it mostly has service times (we have about 12 a week in our parish, including a Polish vigil mass every Saturday!), parish news, and info about the parish, churches, etc. but you’d think they could do more with a domain name like catholic.co.uk! It is useful though, if I just feel like going to mass one evening in the week I can check if there is one on that day.
 
This actually makes for a good question. What should a good parish website accomplish? What ought it to include? How often should it be updated with what kinds of information? What feautres would be worthwhile or better avoided?
 
How effective is this?
Thousand of people have complained but still the Saint Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis defies Church teachings.

stjoan.com/glfr.htm

:mad:
 
re #8

I like various things about our website(oursaviournyc.org/.) The sechedule of course, but also the pastor’s sermons and a nice touch, a guide to making a good Confession. When i look through it, i realize how easy it is to overlook things.
 
Here is an great example of what I like to see on a parish website:

stcharlesborromeokc.org/church/churchMission.htm
We espouse a model of church in which laity are valued.

***First of all, we have always been a forward-looking parish, quick to implement the spirit of Vatican II, and ready to embrace new liturgical forms to enhance our worship. We espouse a model of church in which laity are valued, and women and men work collaboratively with clergy and religious.
This was a parish I was considering attending for daily mass. There website was immensely helpful for me to weed them out. Thanksdissenters!
 
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Kielbasi:
… a parish website would be useful and accessible to approximately .0002% of the Catholics here …
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I maintain our parish website. I try to keep it as current as possible tracking down priests, parish organization members, etc.; yet with 3000+ families in the parish, in over a year we’'ve had less than 3000 hits and of the hits that we have had, about half of them were from me testing changes that I’ve made to see how it works/looks in IE, FireFox. Netscape, etc.; – it’s a bit frustrating to see it used so little.
 
Our parish uses one of those canned Web designs from Parishesonline. The calendar is vacant. There is little helpful stuff. The design is horrible, but that’s primarily because it looks like every other canned parish Web site.

I offered to design a Web site years ago, but the parish secretary wanted to do it instead. You gets what you pays for.

'thann
 
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Trelow:
Here is an great example of what I like to see on a parish website:

stcharlesborromeokc.org/church/churchMission.htm
We espouse a model of church in which laity are valued.

***First of all, we have always been a forward-looking parish, quick to implement the spirit of Vatican II, and ready to embrace new liturgical forms to enhance our worship. We espouse a model of church in which laity are valued, and women and men work collaboratively with clergy and religious.
This was a parish I was considering attending for daily mass. There website was immensely helpful for me to weed them out. Thanksdissenters!
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Ooooo, that’s a scary one!
Check ours out!
saintcyrils.org
 
Ours is transitioning coabvm.org. There is more information at the old site coabvm.org/old.htm. All the links along the left margin seem to be dead, but the ones in the main body seem to work okay.

Thought for the day:

***Spiritual: ***The fear of the Lord is to hate evil. – Proverbs 8:13
***Food: ***The more a person respects and fears God, the more he or she will hate evil. Love for God and love for sin cannot coexist. Harboring secret sins means that you are tolerating evil within yourself.
***Thought: ***Make a clean break with sin and commit yourself completely to God.
 
Like most websites, a parish website needs a few things to be successful:
  1. Accurate and Up-to-Date
In other words, if I need the Mass times for a Holy Day in 2 days - I should find them. And the bulletin on the site should be the current one - not 5 years old.
  1. Useful
Consider your audience - and that depends on the parish. If you have a lot of visitors to your church, then the same is likely to be true of your website. At a minimum have easy to follow directions to the church for visitors.

For regular parishioners, they’ll probably be most interested in what’s going on with the groups of the parish - but not what those groups did 5 years ago - what they are working on now.
  1. Not Annoying
While things that flash and make noise are entertaining to an infant - they mostly annoy anyone older than that. Very few infants will be looking at your website. Don’t make it blink or noisy 🙂
 
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Kielbasi:
a parish website would be useful and accessible to approximately .0002% of the Catholics
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The only time I look at our parish site is to check the mass schedule. Usually on a holy day or other special occasion, and the info I want is NEVER there. I always have to call the office, and I always complain that the web site was useless.

Until a parish can get that right, keep the schedule correct and up to date, don’t even bother with “mission statements” and other miscellaneous stuff that absolutely no one will ever see.
 
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thann:
… You gets what you pays for …
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I’m doing it for free – design, development, maintence and hosting the site is done as part of my stewardship to the church.
 
Sir Knight:
I’m doing it for free – design, development, maintence and hosting the site is done as part of my stewardship to the church.
Click to expand...
The intent of my comment (“you gets what you pays for”) was to highlight the fact that the church secretary has NO experience designing Web pages, while I’ve designed Webs for about 10 years (personal, academic, corporate, commercial). I, too, would have donated my services (which I do for my son’s former school, including picking up all domain and hosting costs). As a result, the pages are difficult to navigate (despite the fact that she is using a canned template), have crummy graphics, have dead links, and have outdated or nonexistent content.

I would step in and offer to take over, but the secretary is proud of her work.

'thann
 
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