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

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: