Now that you’ve had a chat with other people invested in the church website and worked out what the purpose of you churches website is going to be, it’s time to work out what functions, pages and so on you are going to build in and when. For example, there may be a feature that you need on day one when you push the site live. There might be another that you can add later on down the line and shouldn’t slow you down from getting things up and running, finally there might be something which people are pushing you for but really isn’t a good fit.
At this point, it’s useful to divide functions into “Need, Want and Don’t Fit”. “Need” is for the vitals, that need to be in the bare minimum version. “Wants” are the nice touches that would really enhance your site and “Don’t want” are the thing which will distract and take focus away from your purpose and goal.
Our Needs, Wants and Didn’t fits
In our case, we needed multilingual support on day one with a Polish and English language version to reflect our bi-lingual services. We also needed information about how to come along to our church and how to contact people to find out more information. In our “wants” was a redesigned sermon section, a new calendar section with details of upcoming events and a blog section for the future. In our “don’t wants” was a complicated Church management system, detailed sermon notes, a shop etc. This last list may seem pretty redundant but it can be useful to verbalise in case someone later asks why you got rid of some function or another.
Blessing Mpofu says
Neat!
Did you identify any anticipated future needs? What are they and how have your provisioned for them?