I was recently contacted by my home church in the United States. They needed me to make some website modifications for them. It should have been a breeze, but it wasn’t.
I immediately ran into technical problems due to how their site was configured on the server. When I dealt with the hosting company they were using, it took over a dozen emails to find out they couldn’t help me. Poor customer service. Bad hosting company.
The CMS that had been picked by the original developer, didn’t give the church the flexibility it needed to grow. The system was maxed-out from day one. A simple added page could cripple the system. To make matters worse, the site was threaded together with two different CMS’s!
My old church didn’t have the original media company make the changes because, “it wasn’t in the budget.”
This could have been completely avoided had more planning been done from the beginning. Having a good website for your church or organization doesn’t start with Photoshop, it starts with a pencil and paper. There are several key questions that need to be asked, here are a few.
Budget
First, what’s the budget? That’s what should be asked, but even that question isn’t deep enough. These are the types of questions that should be asked about the budget:
- What’s the launch budget?
- What’s the monthly maintenance budget?
- How much is being budgeted for future modifications?
- What’s the expected longevity of the website before budgeting a redesign?
Vendors
Choose your vendors wisely. No matter the size of your church, this applies. If the site is being built by a volunteer or you’re slinging handfuls of cash towards a full service agency, choose wisely. My church didn’t choose their hosting provider, it was preferred by the developer (for what reason I do not know). Unfortunately, after the agency built the site, the church was left to deal with the hosting’s customer service, not the agency. There’s an old saying:
You get what you pay for.
I’ve been talking with a non-profit organization that is looking for a site rebuild. Why? Their current fender will charge them hundreds of dollars for adding a page. You see, they’re at their maximum of 10-pages, so adding pages starts to cost more. Know what the limitations are!
Future
Also, plan on the website growing. YOU WILL NEED MORE PAGES! I’ve never seen a website hold steady. Be sure the site that is being built has room for it. Plan on it from the start, so when it happens, there are no shock-waves.
You also need to think about who will modifying and updating the site now and in the future:
- What will be updated?
- Who will be doing the updating?
- Can pages be added, menus be changed, as well as content?
Had my church’s website been built on a different CMS, all of these things could have been done from the church office, and it wouldn’t have cost them any more of an invest, maybe less. As I’ve entered talks with the non-profit organization, guess what their first questions were?
Can we make any updates? What’s our page limitation?
They learned the hard way, as well as my church.
My hope is that more churches and organizations will consider at least these few things before making the leap with a new website.
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