Last week, Mike wrote about five principles of church website design. Here, he gets practical with the nuts and bolts of everything you’ll need to do as you set about designing or redesigning your church’s website.

Here’s a down-and-dirty checklist for you and your team to use when setting out to build a new website:

Vision

• Write down how your website serves the mission of the ministry.
• List out the type of users who will come to the site and what you want them to do.
• Create a list of 10 church websites that you like, and name what you like about each.

Blog Style

• Make sure the font is big enough.
• Make sure there is a good contrast between the background color and the text color.
• Decide how images will be used in a post.
• Decide who will be allowed to write posts.
• Decide how often you’ll post. (And whatever frequency you decide, make sure you stick to the schedule: an old blog post is worse than no blog post).

Branding

• Get a logo made. (I would advise investing in a good one you paid for rather than a free OK one.)
• Choose colors that are OK to use with your brand.
• Choose styles you’ll use for headlines, subheads, body text, pullquotes, blockquotes, and other text.
• Pick out 20 photos and make a mood board to show the vibe your site will have. (This will be helpful to show volunteers who are working on the project with you know what you’re looking for.)
• Write out how you explain your ministry—do it in a page, a paragraph, a sentence, and a couple words. (It will be helpful when you have more people involved, and when you need to pitch this idea to get people on board.)

Team

• Make sure you have people who actually know how to code a website. (I.e. don’t force the intern to learn HTML.)
• Identify who needs to approve the website before it goes out.
• If you have volunteers, make sure that they agree to a timeline. (These projects can go on forever.)
• Consider whether hiring someone from the outside for the project would help leadership better focus on areas where they’re more skilled. 

Technology

• Identify a webhost that isn’t awful. (If your church isn’t going to be streaming a ton of sermons, Media Temple is a good one.)
• Identify the CMS that you’ll use. I like WordPress.
• Decide if standard web fonts will work, or if you’ll want to use any of the fonts on sites like Typekit.

Project Management

• Find out how much it will cost to host the website.
• Identify how many hours it’ll take to manage the site and content and the staff and volunteers who will own that.
• Identify what pieces of the project you’ll need to outsource.
• Get a quote(s) on a range that it will cost to develop.
• Create a budget and make sure the proper people approve it. 

Some Helpful Articles

• “Lazy eyes: How we read online,” Michael Agger. Slate, June 13, 2008.
• “Installing WordPress.”
• “20 Steps to Better Wireframing,” Clive Howard. Think Vitamin, Feb. 18, 2009.