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
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.
