New Media Ministry » Showcase

Friday Showcase: Sites of the Week

Matt Brown — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:00:27 +0000

New Media Ministry’s Friday Showcase is a weekly highlight of outstanding church ministry website designs. We take a deeper look at websites and highlight things that the site is doing well, and places where we think that they could improve. Our goal in providing this weekly resource is to give you ideas and inspiration for your own ministry website, as well as to help keep you up to date with what is out there in the digital ministry landscape.

Click here to read previous Friday Showcase Posts

This week, we’re going to change up the way we’ve been typically doing things in the hopes of highlighting multiple sites that are doing things well in terms of their interactive ministry. We’d love to know what you think of the sites below in the comments:

Stonebriar Community Church

Kingsfield Church

City Central

Edmond’s First Baptist Church

Church of the Open Door

Do you have a ministry website that you’ve come across that you like and want to recommend to us? Let us know below. Seriously, we want to hear from you.

Friday Showcase: Catholic Youth Ministry

Matt Brown — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:05:29 +0000

New Media Ministry’s Friday Showcase is a weekly highlight of outstanding church ministry website designs. We take a deeper look at an individual website and highlight things that the site is doing well, and places where we think that they could improve. Our goal in providing this weekly resource is to give you ideas and inspiration for your own ministry website, as well as to help keep you up to date with what is out there in the digital ministry landscape.

Click here to read previous Friday Showcase Posts

Introduction

In this week’s collection, we are going to take a look at a new resource website that was just launched last week by the folks over at LifeTeen: CatholicYouthMinistry.com. Their website, http://www.CatholicYouthMinistry.com, is the new home for numerous tools and resources provided by LifeTeen. Matt Smith, Director of Internet Ministries for Life Teen, explains in this video that in ministry, “you can’t give what you don’t have.” The goal for CatholicYouthMinistry.com is to provide a variety of resources to people involved in ministry so that they are always prepared to minister.

Form and Function

The new launch of CatholicYouthMinistry.com is a complete redesign as well as a complete renovation and addition to what was previously known as ym.lifeteen.com. The site listed many of the same great resources included in the new version, but they were hard to find and access. The new design of content and the organization structure really permits much simpler use of the website.

If you’ve been following our Where Do I Start? series, you’ll know that last week, I wrote an article about why I think you should use WordPress in building websites. Apparently I’m not the only who thinks this way as LifeTeen built the new CatholicYouthMinistry.com website using the WordPress platform. I think they did this for a few reasons. The first being that it’s free, which anyone in ministry loves. Another few reasons goes along with reasons they highlighted on their site when they announced their launch:

Easier Access to Resources
Better Blogs
Better Jobs
More Interaction

This list in a nutshell describes WordPress exactly. I think it was a great move on LifeTeen’s part choosing WordPress to power their new website. It allows for content to be published very easily and efficiently, but it also provides a much easier way for end users to come to the site and find exactly what they are looking for quickly without getting lost.

New Media

One of the things I like about the new CatholicYouthMinistry.com website is what I think they will be utilizing a lot, and that is video. LifeTeen recently joined Vimeo, and they have slowly but surely been using that to handle their video content for the last few months. I am a big supporter of Vimeo, and am glad to see LifeTeen using them as well.

Another thing I really like is that the new CatholicYouthMinistry.com is placing a huge emphasis on blogging. LifeTeen has assembled a strong list of about 35 contributing authors that they feature on their site. Blogs are beginning to become published regularly, and cover a variety of topics. I think this will really serve them well, along with readers of the website. It will allow people involved in different aspects of ministry to come together and voice their opinions and experiences in the hopes of helping others. This is relational ministry at it’s finest.

Conclusion

If you are involved in Catholic Youth Ministry, I think it would serve you well to check out the site that LifeTeen has just published. It already has a tremendous amount of resources, and will continue to grow in the future as more and more content is provided.

If you’re interested in learning more about LifeTeen and their approach to Catholic Youth Ministry, head on over to Lifeteen.com and read through their resources. It is a great program. I grew up in it, and still serve as a Core Team member today to help others experience the same that I did.

Friday Showcase: The City Church – January 8th, 2010

Matt Brown — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:32:14 +0000

Introduction

New Media Ministry’s Friday Showcase is a weekly highlight of outstanding church ministry website designs. In this week’s collection, we are highlighting The City Church, located in Kirkland, WA, just across Lake Washington from Downtown Seattle. Their website, http://www.thecity.org, is the central home for the many resources and ministries provided by The City Church across their six campuses in the Greater Seattle Area.

Form and Function

There is a fine line in the design field in general, but more specifically in the webspace of barely having enough versus going completely overboard as far as design goes. I think that upon loading The City Church website for the first time, I was immediately impressed with how well they appear to fall right in the right place in between too much and too little. TheCity.org is a perfect example of a simplistic design that includes all of the information that they need. Often times, you’ll come across websites that have so much information that they try to throw as much of it on one page as possible. This isn’t the case with City Church – the website includes a vast amount of information and resources, but all is organized in a very easy to find navigable way.

The website homepage includes featured events, news and resources via a nice flash slider, similar to the NewMediaMinistry.com homepage. They also include a very simple, easy to use calendar of events, which is definitely a very valuable resource to have on the homepage. But, probably the most important resource that they have on the homepage in yet again, a very simple to use fashion, is the services times & directions to the six different campuses that they operate at. There is no need for a potential visitor to struggle navigating through page after page on their website to find service times due to the fact that it is presented in such an upfront manner.

New Media

There are three places I think in which The City Church really excels in their website, and which sets them apart from other sites. The first I mentioned earlier, and that is the simplicity, yet effectiveness of their design. The second is similar to a feature we talked about last week in our Showcase of College Park Church – The City Church Podcast. The folks at The City Church have gone ahead and gotten listed in iTunes, so all their listeners have to do is simply subscribe to the podcast, and every time a new one is uploaded, it will automatically be downloaded and the listeners will be notified.

I think providing not only audio resources for members but video resources as well is an invaluable tool for ministries of all kind to provide. Folks like The City Church and College Park Church have both made it a strong emphasis on their current website, and rightfully so. It provides both current and potential new members with resources to use on their own time no matter where they are on their individual spiritual journey. If you are a minister looking to build a website or even if you currently have one, audio and video need to play a major role in it like they do on this website.

Social Media

Last week, I was somewhat critical of the social media efforts of College Park Church. I stand by my criticism. This week though, I am proud to let you know that The City Church is very effectively using their Twitter account. They are not only using it to promote their podcasts, but also to interact with their members and answer any questions they have as well as to direct them to resources. They have amassed a large following of about 1800 followers, which is pretty good considering that they’ve only sent out 142 tweets.

Where The City Church really stands out from the pack is their own in house social network Groups Application. This application has been built to allow members to:

Use this online directory to search for and find the perfect small group for you!

Request to join the small group by using the “Join” button. (An email will be sent directly to the leader.)

Attend the small group, build relationships, and grow in your faith and walk with God!

This is quite a valuable tool as it allows for members of a very large parish to break down into much smaller groups and really achieve and experience the value of relational ministry. No longer due members have to be intimidated by attending a huge church and not really being able to know but just a few people; instead, they are able to use this tool to become aware of the different small groups that are offered at the churches that are led by a variety of leaders. They can then pick and choose which groups they may be interested in joining.

Conclusion

I think that The City Church does an excellent job managing a multi-campus parish. One of the ways they are able to do this is through their simple, yet highly resourceful and functional website. Their Groups Directory Application really is a very well-done piece that in the long run will prove to be a very successful investment on their part.

To learn more about The City Church:

Visit their Website – http://www.thecity.org/
Follow them on Twitter – http://twitter.com/thecitychurch
Find the Pastor on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/judahsmith
Watch Videos on Vimeo – http://vimeo.com/thecity
Subscribe to their Podcasts – http://www.thecity.org/media/podcast

Friday Showcase: College Park Church – January 1st, 2010

Matt Brown — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:30:22 +0000

Introduction

New Media Ministry’s Friday Showcase is a weekly highlight of outstanding church ministry website designs. In this week’s collection, we have are highlighting College Park Church, located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Their website, http://www.yourchurch.com, is powered by the Ekklesia360 Content Management System (read here).

Form and Function

The homepage of the College Park Church is exceptional. Ever since I found this site a few months ago, I immediately fell in love with the color scheme, the design and the content layout.. The intelligent mix of dark and white colors is very pleasing to the eye. The navigation and content is very well thought out and very simple to navigate. Upon arriving at the website, it is very hard to tell just how big of a website it really is.

New Media

College Park Church uses some great new media tools and resources in their site in order to serve a variety of age groups involved in their church. One of the great things that I love that they do is offer their Sunday Message as a podcast available each week. The sermon can either be streamed online live from the website or downloaded and subscribed to via iTunes. A manuscript version of the sermon can also be downloaded. A cool feature that I haven’t seen before is that the fourth option is to download what College Park titles the “Sunday Package” – which includes the following:

Sermon Audio MP3
Sermon Manuscript
Study Guide
Service Bulletion
News & Opportunities

Another feature that College Park puts on is it’s Verse by Verse Radio Ministry. This is a daily radio show that broadcasts in the greater Indianapolis area that acts as an extension of the pulpit. Each daily message originates from the pulpit of College Park at some point in time. The message is literally what it’s named – a verse by verse study of different books of the Bible. This can be heard over the radio airwaves daily, online at the website, or subscribed to in iTunes.

Social Media

For all the things that College Park is doing correctly, I personally was a little disappointed to see how little they appear to be doing in the social mediascape. Sure, they’re ahead of most churches and ministries because they have a physical Facebook Fan Page and Twitter Presence, but for a church with so many resources and ministries, they aren’t utilizing the full potential of their presence on Twitter and Facebook very well.

Their Facebook page currently has about 667 fans, which is great. However, the only thing I really see on their profile is a direct link to new Sermons and Verse by Verse broadcasts. The thing that sets Facebook apart from anything that has been done before is that it is a platform built around conversations and connections. I think that College Park could really benefit by investing some time in their Facebook profile to better connect with fans by broadcasting up events happening at the church, posting photos and videos, initiating connections with existing members as well as new ones, and much more.

The same can also be said for their Twitter profile. Again, to give credit, they are a few steps ahead of many other churches and ministries who still haven’t lept into the world of Social Media. However, just by having a bare minimal presence almost has the same effect as having no presence at all.

College Park has their Twitter setup so that whenever a new Sermon or Verse by Verse broadcast is posted, it’s notified to their followers. However, they only have 32 followers currently. For a church as large as they are, I think they really should spent some time building up a list of followers, actually physically sharing and posting content instead of having it pushed over automatically. Twitter is a very valuable resource, and simply just having a presence and occasionally using it I think is just as bad as not having a presence at all.

Conclusion

College Park Church’s website leaves a wonderful impression on its visitors. It looks very creative and professional and definitely should be considered as a way above average website. They offer wonderful resources such as their podcasts, but i would like to see them add some video capabilities in addition to utilizing Facebook and Twitter to help round out their New Media involvements.