Your website is a very valuable tool. Think of it as a platform on which you can communicate to the world. This platform becomes a first impression for many and a communication method for others. Asking yourself the following questions will help you keep your website a tool of your ministry and not just a toy.

Is the purpose of our website to provide content, community, or both? If you choose both, that is a hard answer: content and community have a tendency to work against each other. A content-based website is going to be very easy for the first-time visitor to find what he is looking for; information will not be cluttered. A community-based website assumes that the normal visitor is one that comes back over and over. The community has much more input and ability to change the website.

What communication problem is best solved by our website? Possible answers: color brochure, self-guided tour, in-depth information, directions, times of services, or what we are all about.

What is the maintenance cost of our website? Another way to ask this question is how many hours a week is it going to take to maintain our content or community? Many people see a website as a one-time project, but the work to keep it up to date can be daunting.

Who is going to look at our website the most? If someone mentions your website to you, ask him questions such as what he was using it for, how it worked for him, and what was frustrating.