A.ngel.us

Burke Ingraffia 7 March 2010 Best Practices, Featured 2 Comments

You might have experienced this scenario: You are asked or hired by a parish or church organization to build a website, and you couldn’t be happier.  At first, that is.  You put a lot of work into the project, designing what you know to be the most effective informational design layout with beautiful colors and contemporary graphics.  You put all of your professional design experience into giving the client what you know to be the best website for their needs.

And then you present it to a committee.

Website by committee.  Ughhh.  You find that everybody in the committee wants something different, and nobody really gets it.  One older lady wants a script font everywhere that you know is going to be hard to read on the computer monitor.  You smile and say yes, maybe we can do that.  The graphics you spent hours on with warm gradients and just the right amount of color balance do not please some of the men in the group.  You were building the site for free or at a discount for the church, and now you are spending a lot more time and resources to create something that you don’t think is the best that it can be.

You speak with the priest on the committee one-on-one.  Surely, he can make some executive decisions and see things your way.  But this is not always the case.  In one parish where I used to live, the old men of the community had a nickname for the parish office manager – they called her “The Bishop.” She was the one who told the priest what to do.

What I have listed below are some steps and best practices to help you if you are working with a parish or church.

1. If there is a committee that makes the decisions, meet with them before writing a single line of code.  Find out what they want in the beginning.  You might be excited to get started quickly, but be patient.
2. Require them to provide you with 3 or 4 examples of websites that they like, and make them come to a consensus on this before you meet with them.
3. Get the specific color scheme they want up front, and try to explain to them that too many colors will make the site frenetic and ugly.
4. Require them to outline what they want the site to do.  Is it just an informational site, or do they want more interactivity like forms, maps and downloadable files?
5. Do what you can before you start creating the site to educate the group on the difference between a good website and a bad website.  Explain to them informational design best practices.  Show them examples of the direction you are going to take before you start.
6. Have them write the copy they want and every image for every specific page on the site before you start building the site.  This will help you with your layout to make sure that the site is neither cluttered nor has large empty white space gaps on some pages.
7. Create some sort of content management system (CMS) that will allow them to update content on their own.
8. If you are building the site for free, before you start give them a time limit at which point your work will no longer be free.  This will motivate them to provide you with the info you need.  (side note:  be sure to indicate on your income taxes the following year the amount of work you did for free for any 501 (c) 3 organization)
9. Once the site is built, plan for one major instructional session and be assured they will need you to help them little-by-little for the next 6 months or so.

Do your best work.  Just because you pray a lot doesn’t make you a good website designer.  Learn what you can from online tutorials.  Observe what large, mainstream websites are doing.  They pay the top professional people to do market research on what works best – follow their examples.

Most importantly, be patient.  You might know a lot about the Web, but there is still a lot to learn about humility.  Getting your ego bruised is one way the evil in the world can thwart your efforts and ruin the good relationship you had with the organization when they first asked you to begin the project.