University Christian Fellowship
Syracuse, New York
http://www.ucf.org

This appears to be a fairly run-of-the-mill church website until you read these two pages:

Questions We Get Asked About Our Church Service, and Our Snappy Answers
UCF Order of Worship

The humor is priceless! The only thing I wish is that they would give those two pages more prominence (if you start from the home page, they are a bit hard to find).

Contact: Unknown

Manna?
Holland, Michigan
http://www.mannais.org

I like this site because it’s really just a community blog. Anyone in the congregation (or outside the congregation) can post to the website. The lack of traditional trappings combined with the simplicity of the site and its group nature make me feel like this church is authentic.

I especially like the Manna FAQ section, in particular the answer to “So who preaches and are there sermon series or points or whatever?” Beautiful. A close second is the answer that mentions snake-handling, although the lack of that time-honored tradition would probably keep me from being a part of Manna? if I lived in Holland, Michigan (Gee, if Mike Boyink can suggest I get a tattoo, I ought to be able to get away with suggesting Mike start handling snakes! How about it Mike?).

All kidding aside, take a look also at this article about the Manna? website which touches on the power of the Manna? website concept.

The Manna? site also uses my favorite content management system, ExpressionEngine.

Contact: Mike Boyink is the designer/developer.

Jacob’s Well
Kansas City, Missouri
http://www.jacobswellchurch.org

This is by far my favorite church website. The “Community” section is brilliant. Through the use of biographies (it appears that most of the people in the congregation have contributed at least a short bio) and photos, it presents people rather than an organization. Through its use of blogs and discussion forums, it presents the authentic voice of the congregation (not just its leaders) to unbelievers in the Kansas City area.

The one thing I don’t like about this site is that these elements which are so strategic to reaching unbelievers are actually in a password-protected area. When the site was first launched, I registered and was given a username and password which is still functional. I have no contact with the church at all, so I assume they allow anyone to register (and probably use that information to police the forums and other places where users can contribute), but I would like to see the information in the Community section presented publicly, without any need for prior registration and login. They could still require registration and login for a user to contribute (or edit previous contributions), but presenting the information publicly would, in effect, open the authenticity of the congregation for everyone to see, whether believer or unbeliever.

Contact: Scott Raymond () is the designer/developer

I was asked yesterday by a reader of this blog for a list of church websites I like. I responded to the email, but thought it would make a good subject for a series of articles, so here goes.

To be honest, because I have some fairly strong opinions on these issues, there are not a lot of church websites I like. But in this series, I’m going to mention a few that I admire, along with the reasons for my admiration and any further information I might have. I may not like everything about these sites (and I’ll tried to point out what I don’t like), but there are aspects which are encouraging to me. Where I list contacts, some are people I know (almost always virtually), but some I have never met.

Feel free to suggest other church websites you like in the comments section, but if we can, let’s try to point to church websites who are effectively using the web in terms of their strategy not just websites that look good (which is not bad in itself, but good-looking websites without an effective online strategy are irrelevant, in my opinion).

Church of the Resurrection
Leawood, Kansas
http://www.cor.org

The main reason I like this site is because it features “normal” people. If you visit the Resurrection Stories section of the site, you’ll find brief testimonies of normal people from within the congregation. One of the strategies I advocate for church websites is to include an extensive set of life stories of believers in the congregation. These are then used to promote the church to various segments of society. While I am not a big fan of religious testimonies on church websites (which the stories on this site resemble to some extent) — largely because the vast majority of unbelievers won’t initially care about religious testimonies — I do applaud the prominence this church gives to the “normal” people in its congregation. In an earlier version of the site, the photos of the people and their stories were prominently featured on the front page, and I would like to see them go back to that, but in general, the fact that they feature people from within the congregation means I don’t get the sense that this is primarily an institution — instead, it’s a group of people.

Contacts: the folks who write the Appian Way blog - Clif Guy, Brian Slezak, Chuck Russell, and Leo Johns.

Evan Donovan of TechMission.org wrote me a few days ago to tell me about a new site they have launched, ChristianVolunteering.org. Here’s what Evan had to say about the site:

ChristianVolunteering.org is a free directory with over 2,000 volunteer opportunities in ministries serving the “poor.” The site’s partners include the Salvation Army, GospelCom (BibleGateway.com), World Vision, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions and over 1,000 ministries serving under-resourced communities.  In addition to volunteer opportunities for individuals, you can also search the site for opportunities that might be appropriate for church small groups and for short-term missions trips.  If you just type your postal code, you can get a listing of the volunteer opportunities in your region.

A second site, UrbanMinistry.org, is designed to equip people to serve the “poor.” Here is how the site describes itself:

(A) destination site for the urban ministry and Christian community development community: a website designed to connect individuals and Christian ministries, empowering them to bring social justice in Jesus’ name. On UrbanMinistry.org, you can meet others interested in urban ministry, start a blog, and share resources that have been helpful to you in the Urban Ministry wiki. You can also browse through an extensive library of sermons and lectures, recommended books, MP3 podcasts, justice-related videos, Christian workshops and presentations, and more.

Both of these sites are well worth bookmarking and visiting often. Thanks to Evan for telling me about them!

My friend Bradley Burck just launched a website for his new book — Conquering Nonprofit Chaos.

Bradley is a fundraising and marketing consultant who works with non-profits and Christian ministries to help them craft strategic development and marketing plans. His firm, Burck Communications, also provides design, copywriting and print services as well as training for non-profit boards and staffs.

When you have a chance, check out their new website. There is a lot of content which will prove helpful to churches and ministries.

Here is what appears to be a new blog on internet evangelism (at least the first and only post is about internet evangelism), written by someone named Bob Fox. Does anyone know anything about this blog?

A couple of months ago, in this article, I mentioned that I had stopped designing and coding websites for churches and ministries in favor of consulting regarding web strategy issues and also in favor of some personal projects.

One of the websites I was thinking of when I mentioned “personal projects” was actually a team effort by some friends of mine and myself. And today, I’m happy and excited to announce the launch of MissionEquip.com, a virtual toolkit of services to assist in preparation for missions trips, both short-term and long-term. The site is divided into four main sections: Prepare, Go, Connect, and Share.

I put some time in this weekend to sprucing up this blog a bit. Things were getting a bit stale, and I've been toying with some changes for awhile, so the three-day weekend seemed like a good time to do some housekeeping. Here are some of the changes which I've made:

1. A New Logo. I've long been dissatisfied with the masthead I was using on the site (for those who don't remember, it was simply the words "Strategic Digital Outreach" and the tagline "Telling the old, old story via modern-day wineskins" sitting on top of part of a map of the world. Recently, while looking for some world maps at a stock photography site, I came across some globes that had been transformed into cube shapes. I was fairly enamored of these cubes and thought they would lend themselves to a good logo treatment, so a few days ago, I started playing around and it wasn't long before I came up with the simple logo you now see in the masthead.
2. A New Sidebar Design. The new logo sparked some ideas for a cleaner sidebar, primarily through repeating the cube motif in the various sidebar headings. I also have wanted to bring the feed icon up higher in the sidebar and give it more prominence.
3. LinkedIn. In keeping with a desire to concentrate more on consulting than actual nuts-and-bolts design work (more on that in a moment), I decided to beef up my LinkedIn profile (largely following the encouragement of Guy Kawasaki in his blog article LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover) and add a link to that profile in the sidebar. While I've greatly improved the content in my profile, the largest deficiency is definitely the relative lack of connections! So if you are a LinkedIn member and you would like to connect, please feel free to send me an invitation!

4. I feel a little bit like Bob Dole. On May 15, 1996, at the outset of his presidential campaign, Bob Dole announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate with these words, "So today I announce that I will forego the privileges not only of the office of the majority leader but of the United States Senate itself, from which I resign effective on or before June 11th. And I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man."

   I still remember listening to that stunning announcement and thinking what a huge risk he was taking in giving up the power and trappings of his position for an uncertain fate at the hands of the American voters. I feel a little bit like him.

   I've said on more than one occasion (both publicly on this blog and in private conversations with friends) that I feel my strengths lie more in the area of web strategy than in actual design and coding of websites. And yet I have continued to some extent to do just that — design and code websites for churches and ministries. Several weeks ago, however, I decided to take a risk and stop coding and designing so that I could give myself entirely to consulting with churches and ministries regarding online strategy (internet marketing, usability, writing, etc.) as well as to some personal publishing projects of my own.

   The risk in that is that the coding and design of websites was helping pay my family's bills. Now, "I stand before you" as a simple strategist and not a designer/coder. And I'm not sure that online strategy consulting (especially to churches and ministries) will be able to help pay the bills.

   Several weeks ago, some readers may have noticed that I added a section to the sidebar of this blog entitled "We Recommend." In that section, I have listed (currently) six web development firms who I recommend that churches and ministries consider contracting with to develop new or improve existing websites. All of these firms are owned by Christians and all are excellent designers and coders. If you need web development, I would strongly encourage you to contact one or more of these companies.

5. New Projects. For as long as I can remember, the "Projects" section of the sidebar on this site has included only one website — ChristianCruz.com, a local portal for believers living in Santa Cruz County. With this "mini-relaunch" of the Strategic Digital Outreach website, I have added two additional websites — ProdigalGod.com (definitely a work in progress) and ChristianScreenSavers.com.
6. Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and Valid CSS. When I first began this blog, I set up the content management system and page layouts very quickly. I always meant to work on the code so that it would validate, but I never seemed to get around to it. But this weekend, I decided that I would bring the site up to standards compliance (especially since I talk about the importance of standards compliance on this site from time to time), and I'm happy to report that I've been able to do so.

Cynthia Ware left a comment for my recent post about Marqui, and as I normally do when someone new (to me) comments, I went to visit her blog — The Digital Sanctuary. It looks like a great resource to add to the growing list of bloggers who discuss how the church can effectively use technology to reach the world.

From her introductory post in July:

Welcome to the online intersection of technology and the Church.  This site is designed to embrace, explore, evaluate and enhance the vehicle of technology as it is used by the Church to deliver information, connect individuals and revolutionize the way we interact with our world.

I’d encourage you to visit her blog and spend some time reading her articles. Her educational and vocational background would seem to give her a unique perspective on technology issues facing the church and how the church can embrace technology for good.