If your parish decides to have a website, the most important questions you need to ask yourself are:
- Who is this for? (For example, the congregation, the wider community, young people via brownies and cubs)
- Who is responsible for updating the site?
- Who has editorial control of the site?
- What is your annual budget?
Costs
Websites need not be very expensive. For some examples of what is readily available, please visit www.templatemonster.com or www.wix.com
You will need to register a domain name (your www. address) and you will need to pay for the site to be hosted each year.
Maintaining the site
Your website is a global shop window to your faith community. It can be accessed from all over the world. You must make sure you have a willing and able person who can update the site on a very regular basis. At the very least, this needs to be done once a week. Events must be removed immediately after they have ended. Your site needs to be vibrant and interesting.
The website team
You will need:
- Someone to write the content
- Someone to take digital photographs for you
- Someone to update the site regularly
- Someone to take overall editorial control (the Vicar?)
If you don’t think you can fulfil all of the above, you may want to carefully consider whether having a parish website is right for you. You need your website to be professional, relevant and interesting. When it is, it sends out a subliminal message that the church is also professional, relevant and interesting. Perfect!
