Media Outreach

A very happy Wednesday to you, my loyal reader(s). If you’re reading this from work, kudos to you for your devotion to your job, that you should give it 110% on the day before Thanksgiving! I, of course, will be manning my post undaunted, serving my clients with due diligence until such time as someone puts a piece of pie in front of me.

(Just so you know, this will be one of those blog posts where the introductory paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m going to be talking about. Don’t search for hidden metaphors, because they’re not there.)

As a Client Relations Manager on faithHighway’s fulfillment team, one of my primary responsibilities is to relay programming and design requests to our programmers and designers (insert your middleman joke here). In seriousness, I take that portion of my job very seriously, as I feel that it’s my responsibility to not only relay instructions to the designers and programmers, but provide consultation that affects what those instructions are. For example, if a client asks me to have a flock of doves fly in from the sky and land on a cross that was shining light down upon the valley for their Outreach Ministry site, I would probably suggest that a site intended to be used to reach the unchurched might want to consider using a bit more subtlety to convey their message. In my almost 3 years with faithHighway, I’ve received a lot of different requests, which brings me to the central point of today’s post. There is always, without fail, going to be something that can be changed on your website.  It may be graphical, or a page title… it may be a broad change or a minute one… but there is always something that you might want to change. When considering a change though, you should ask yourself something along the lines of the following:

1. Will this change have an impact on my visitor’s overall experience
2. Will this change determine whether or not someone visits my church?
3. Will this change make Andy pick my site for Staff Favorites in faithHighway’s NEW and IMPROVED digital magazine (coming soon to an email address near you)?

If the answer to these questions is no, then it’s probably not worth making the change. I bring up this topic of discussion not to discourage people from making changes to their site, because I absolutely believe that the website should grow along with the church. However, too often I’ve seen people hold back the launch of their website for changes that will not impact someone’s experience whatsoever.  I can fully appreciate that someone might want to change the title of a page from “What’s Going On” to “What’s Happening,” but it’s not a change that should impact the launch of a site. As I stated in last week’s post, a site that stays on faithHighway’s production server doesn’t do anyone any good. A church website is a tool to help spread your message across cyberspace… but what good is a tool that never comes out of the tool box?

I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving, and hope that it is full of love, grace, and pie. Just remember though, a pie that is never eaten is just like a website that hasn’t been launched. It’s beautiful to look at, but cannot truly be enjoyed. Huh… I guess my introductory paragraph had some relevance after all. Who knew?

Photo by Cardamom