Beta-Testing a Blog Based Church Website

In a prior post called Web Pages as An Essential for Church Growth, I suggested that churches try using a blog format for their own websites.  Well, we've decided to take the plunge and switch to a blog based website at the church I pastor - Glen Burnie Evangelical Presbyterian in Glen Burnie, MD.

We are beta testing a new site using Typepad.  For a couple of months we'll run our old website and the new one simultaneously and then, once we get the bugs worked out on the Typepad site we'll go ahead and switch the domains.  As we go into this we may even look at having it hosted somewhere locally and doing it in Movable Type. I wanted to go ahead and just get the ball rolling with Typepad right now because I am familiar with how it works.

Here's the link to our old website.

Here's the link to our new beta testing site.

Here are a few of the things we are working on and potential problems I think we will face.  I'll mention these rather than focus on the positives, because I think the positives are pretty obvious - a dynamic rather than static page, easy updating, more current and interactive.

At this point the site's a bit convoluted.  What we have done is to take all of the stuff that was in the old website, the church brochure kind of stuff, and put it in blog posts.   Then I've linked those posts to items on the sidebars.   The idea is that, eventually, we'll have only a few short posts with the most recent announcements appearing on the front page at any one time, but we'll use the categories feature to allow people to find information affecting their own ministries.

To bloggers, such a site will be no problem.  However, to non-bloggers I think this will be a bit different and it will not be what many have come to expect from a church website. 

What I've noticed on most church websites lately is that they concentrate on having pretty graphics and minimal information on the front pages, with links to other things.  On this one, we're not going to have much in the way of graphics, although we may at some time get one of these blog template designers to do us up something nice.

Also non-bloggers still don't know what a blog is, so I'm not using blog terminoloogy on the site.  Instead of post, I'm using "entry," instead of blog, I'm using the standard, "site" or "website." 

And, though we really want our people to interact with us in the comments section, many people are leery of internet security.  Since comments require e-mail addresses, we are allowing for anonymous comments, which I know could pose a problem for us. Also, in Typepad, as with many other blog services, if you leave your url it will show up in the comment, but if you don't have a url your e-mail address shows up.  Yet, many of our own folks probably won't leave comments if they have to leave an e-mail address, so we're going to take the risk, at least at first, of allowing anonymous comments, and we'll just police them heavily. 

Another issue we are facing is with what do about the welcome message. That really needs to be the one static entry on the site but I don't know how to do this - I've seen this on some Movable Type blogs though.  At this point we basically have to go in and repost this entry every time we do a new entry.

So, let me invite you to go and check it out and let me know what you think. If you have any commments on the design itself, layout or what we are doing, please comment here, not there. If you have a comment specifically related to specific post on the new site that will be fine, but any general comments about the blog itself can come to me here on this post.