Media Outreach

One of my favorite redesigned websites is Open Door Baptist Church. I’ve been in contact with this church over the past year or so discussing their ideas and their vision for their website. Bill, the church’s webmaster, and I talked at length about the heart of their church to be witnesses to their community about the goodness of God and the truth of His word.

Open Door Belmont is a church that is truly about making disciples, and they are using every portion of their website to provide engaging and relevant content to each person who visits their site.

One of the things that I really like about their site is the fact that they have a great deal of flexibility with the main graphic area on their homepage.

• Since they generate their own flash (.swf) files, they can create an endless number of opening presentations to draw in the user. Often times, churches will want to have some sort of flash introduction to their websites.
• The Open Door site gives site visitors the ability to quickly navigate to any page on their site from the homepage which makes for quick and easy access to the content they desire to see.
• Additionally, if Bill decides to use this area for flash intros, he can do one for each sermon series or special event that may be coming up in the life of the church.

The other thing they are doing that I love is that they make great use of our media tool, Sermon Connect.

• They can do streaming audio/video, podcast, and blog all within one system on their site.
• This is a great way to help visitors know what to expect when they come to your church for the first time.
• The main thing I looked for as a college student in a new town was a church where I felt like the pastor was talking about things that I could relate to.

By putting sermons on the web and providing engaging flash content on their homepage, Open Door Belmont will be giving the people in their surrounding community a fresh look into what is going on with their ministry.