David Drinnon was kind enough to reference a comment I left on his site in a fine post this morning on building site maps and information architecture. In it he even calls me a friend!

What I love about blogging is that I left a partially thought through comment on his site last week and then he gives me kudos today and places my thoughts alongside his wisdom such that I come out looking like a champ! The reality is that he has some great nuggets in that little post including Web Sort and Adobe’s Website Production Management Techniques.

In a beautiful example of what goes around comes around, I am today beginning work with my team on the Information Architecture for a new site we are trying to crank out by the first two weeks in December. David’s help could not have come at a better time!

This entry is part of a series on building church websites. Check out the first post.

Require Project Sponsorship and Involved Stakeholders
Having fought through a number of IT projects in the past without executive sponsorship and involved stakeholders, I don’t think I would do it again. It isn’t fair to the team of people who are working so hard to get the site built. If the project isn’t important enough to the organization that an executive or Elder needs to oversee it, then the web project has a low opportunity for success and the outcome will be poor. When we say “executive sponsorship”, we aren’t just saying a dictum or decree is handed down that all staff will cooperate so the site gets built. We are saying that a) this individual is accountable to others for the projects success, b) he/she is engaged in every phase, and c) the person is clearing roadblocks for the web team that they can’t clear themselves.  Read the rest of this post... (2337 words, estimated 9:21 mins reading time)

This entry is part of a series on building church websites. Check out the first post.

Know Your Users

There is a temptation with church people to try and reach everyone all of the time. Some churches egocentrically want everyone to be *their* audience. As a result, Church Marketing Sucks. Knowing and prioritizing your users will get you further than any other single thing you can do on a web project. When you have been diligent in this phase, hard decisions during the stretch become much more simple. Don’t allow your project to move forward until you know the secrets your users aren’t telling.

Church Mission and Vision

In some cases, your churches mission and vision will put you a long way down the road of knowing who you are building the site for. Our mission actually uses the language “All People”, so we did not have the luxury of being handed our target audience. We had to put together a cross-departmental team to profile our audience segments and decide who we would focus the site on. You might be surprised to find out, “the lost” won’t cut it as a target audience.  Read the rest of this post... (1453 words, estimated 5:49 mins reading time)

When our church decided to launch the 3.0 version of our site, we knew it would be a serious effort. As “the web guy”, my charge was to be the glue that holds the pieces of the project together. There are numerous how-tos available for churches who are just getting started with their sites. My hope in this series on how to build a church web site is to share our story in a way that could help someone who already has experience in building sites and could learn from our approach.

Some statistics suggest that as high as 60% of all IT projects fail. With the added difficulty of getting IT things done in non-profit organizations, the challenge may have actually been a bit bigger for us. I am of the opinion that each project requires its own path. This path is largely determined by the goals and size of the project, the length of time for project completion, and the budget. A single approach won’t work for every web project.

Our project was really broken into these phases:  Read the rest of this post... (413 words, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)

• Study the Audience
• Plan the Project
• Plan and Create Content
• Focus on Findability