Custom Ministry Websites
Apr
15
Written by:
4/15/2010 12:29 PM
A letter from a gifted designer, pastor, and SnapShot Web user in Northern Ireland:
Hey, my name’s Neil Young, I am the Youth Pastor at the Causeway Coast Vineyard church, Northern Ireland. Through our youth movement, Destination:Home, we work with a variety of young people in schools, streets, café’s, smallgroups etc and I love what I get to do as a job.
We have been using snapshot web since 2008 and it has been such a valuable tool in communicating why we do what we do and when we do it. We have found a number of things pretty important when it comes to building web sites, especially church based sites.
I think it’s vitally important that the site reflects the ‘feel’ of what we do; it needs to communicate through more than just words ‘who’ we are and what our ministry is like. In our town we are committed to showing people that Jesus and His church are relevant to their lives today so we ensure that the main site areas feel modern and contemporary in design. We want our youth movement to be growing and feel alive so it’s important that the web site reflects that.
We need to think about what we want to communicate and what our intended users want to see. We have found that by mixing and matching templates we have been able to achieve this; so in our 11-14’s sections we introduce more colours and a more fun feel while we keep the 15-18’s section a little more clear and edgy. The parents section is more factual, clear and ordered and this helps them to navigate what for many of them is a new approach to youth ministry.
We try to keep our site fresh by constantly reviewing it and updating teaching topics within each environment and we also put on weekly updates from each event. This job takes up about 30-60 mins a week depending on the level of information needed. The beauty for us is that because the modules are so simple to use, one of my interns, who has no web experience, can happily update it without any problems.
Thank you SnapShot,
Neil Young
www.destination-home.org