Turn your website inside out!
I have the privilege of sitting next to some smart gents this Saturday as part of the Arriving and staying on the web panel session, and one of the ideas I’d like to throw out there is the idea of turning your website inside out.
What I mean is this: say you were after a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Flowers album (hey, it’s got Ruby Tuesday on it, what a great song). Where would you go to get it? These days you might shop at iTunes, or Amazon, or countless other online avenues. Or you might scour some second-hand music stores. No doubt you would go to where music is available for sale.
Now say you had a copy of that album to sell. Would you keep it on the shelf and hope someone will knock on the door and ask to buy it? Unless your house is a famous music museum, you’re probably going to take out an ad somewhere where you know people will read ads for music to buy. Or maybe you’ll take it to the second-hand music store to sell. The point is: you would go to where people are who would want to buy it, to tell them about it.
Obvious? In my line of work, I often find that people build websites assuming that others will knock on their door to buy that album, then (understandably) get discouraged when it doesn’t sell.
Go to where people are
In ministry we’re given the great commission by Jesus to take His gospel to all nations (Matthew 28:19). I think that attitude of going to where people are with the Gospel can apply to websites: we can take the content of our websites to where people are already congregating.
There are so many websites around these days that thrive on communities sharing their content with each other. Whether it’s for fun, like photos and videos on facebook, MySpace and flickr, or to make a coin, like on Etsy or Threadless.
There are loads of opportunities for creative thinking to take our church websites’ content ‘out of the house’ and into the street to where people can see it, engage with it, share it, have a conversation about it — be it to promote events, sermon MP3s, Bible study notes, topical articles — whatever you and your ministry have a passion for.
Ben
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 12:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 5th, 2010 at 11:36 pm
Finally, a good site that isn’t in my face trying to constantly sell me something. Thanks, please keep up the good work.