Church websites

by Jan 5, 2008Uncategorized

I’m designing a new church website and promotional materials for Cleveland Park Baptist Church in nearby Spartanburg, and as part of my preparation I just surveyed some of the work others are doing in this field.

I came across a site which I was impressed with, MyChurchWebsite.com. Their design is relatively spare and clean. It looks a bit formulaic (and I only mean a bit) after you look at a lot of their work, but no one surfing to an individual church’s website would know that.

I have often noted that a church’s website design tells a lot about the church. That’s because a website, like general clothing or decoration or musical styles, is a clear barometers of a church’s (generally socio-economic) culture.

In my years of research for this post (I don’t know how many church sites I’ve surfed in the past five years), I note that there is variation within each category of churches. Not every seeker church has hit the critical mass necessary to include a good web designer. But there are still a lot of messages encoded in every church page. It’s a language you can improve your fluency in.

See if you don’t agree. I made these images smaller so you couldn’t read the words well. Which of the following churches (ok, one isn’t a church) is Emergent? Mainline Protestant? Seeker? KJVO?

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