It is a custom built Microsoft based CMS that anyone with basic internet skills can use. We have discounted it heaps and provide ongoing support for churches who need to call for “help”.

Can you have a look at our site and see if you can see the benefits? Maybe you know of a church that needs help? Our experience with clients with Joomla or WordPress is the complicated set up and lack of human support. A lot of errors seem to arise from Joomla?

Anyway, we are Christians with a passion to help and hope that we can.

I would like to link to your article if that is ok to help churches?

I used to be a Management Consultant and I’m now an Anglican rector so I wouldn’t worry too much about me being sensitive to criticism or misunderstanding!

You’re obviously right about the time thing, I was just taking time as an illustration of one of the limited resources (although the thought of the sermon I could preach if I had 40 hours to prepare it leaves me with something of a wistful longing).

You’re last sentence is really what I was trying to communicate in my initial post.

I’m not sure that more time necessarily means better work (e.g. more time working on sermon doesn’t necessarily result in a better sermon). Therefore, I’m not sure that doing something really well necessarily requires more time (it might instead require finding the right person – with skills and passion – to do it). This is, I think, a big challenge for lots of churches – they want to have a good website, but if they don’t have the skills in-house (either staff or lay people), what can they do? If the wrong person tries to do it, they might end up spending lots of time, with an average result.

I’m not suggesting this is the case with your website at all – I think it’s great. However, I’ve noticed this when I’ve observed other churches.

I also see what you mean about creating a realistic sense of who your church is – no point giving off the vibe that you’re a mega church if the attendance is only 50!

If you talk to anyone who has been involved in ministry with me I suspect they’d confirm I want everything done as well as we can and more importantly, I want it always to be getting better. They’d probably also have something to say about my reaction when we don’t do it as well as we can!

But we can’t talk about ‘to the best of our ability’ without also factoring in ‘making the most of the resources available to us’. We’re a growing church, but we’re still a small church and it is a question of how we marshall limited resources to achieve our priorities. To preach the best that I can, I’d like to devote 40 hours a week to sermon prep. But I can’t do that. To develop leaders to the best of my abilities I’d like to devote 30 hours a week to that. But I can’t do that.

http://www.stmarks.com.au gives, I think a realistic sense of who we are now and seems to create a pretty positive vibe, given the unprompted feedback on it that guests keep giving. It gives a different impression to the site that existed previously, just as the church experience at St Mark’s is different to the one that existed previously. As we continue to develop that Sunday experience through ongoing training and feedback and as we expand the pool of gifts and talent available, the website will develop too (which is part of why I have only ever thought of it as a temporary one).

I don’t know if I’ve addressed myself to your question. If not let me know.

“The other though is that I wouldn’t want too professional a website because frankly anything that suggested slick would mis-represent the vibe of our church and potentially create false expectations and one of my key objectives with the website is to give a site visitor a sense of what it would feel like to come along for the first time.”

I can see what you mean by this, and not wanting church to look too ‘slick’. But I wonder if there’s another angle to come at.

Surely we would like visitors to our churches to think that we strive to do things well – to the best of our ability, and all to the glory of God. Preachers preach to the best of their ability, kids church leaders lead to the best of their ability, musicians play the best of their ability – does the same not apply to a church website?

Which Australian websites have you noticed that have stood out to you, and that could provide good inspiration to other churches?

What do others think? Should these be in the top 10?