The history of Great Church Websites

First, Great Church Websites is not a commercial web design company. It is an educational ministry.

The idea for this website started in April 2004 when I went to a graphic design firm and asked them to develop a logo for a church I want to start in a few years. I was disappointed with the results (the logo sketches).

So I thought, I'll find examples of good church logo design. I'll put them on a (private) webpage, and send the URL to the graphic design firm to inspire the designer to do a better job. This idea worked wonderfully. I received from the designer another group of logo sketches, after he had seen the example logos. Every one of the new sketches was great.

Somewhere along the line, as a result, I got the idea for a website called greatchurchlogos.com. The purpose of the site would be to help churches and parishes improve their logo or create a new logo that was graphically excellent. It would be a "virtual gallery" of excellence in church and parish logo design. For a while, I actually did own that domain name, as well as greatchurchbulletins.com. The idea quickly evolved to greatchurchwebsites.org, however — a virtual gallery of excellence in church and parish website design. This has far more Kingdom impact than a website showcasing church logos or bulletins.

For practical reasons, I've actually focused on church home page design, with the exception noted below. My database contains a reduced-size screenshot of the home page of each church in the database.

Since 2004, I've briefly reviewed a lot of church and parish websites — 14,000 to date. As a result, I can say that there are a lot of church websites out there that really appear dated — about 85% of all church websites, to my estimate. They look like what was considered "state-of-the-art" website design in the early days of the internet. My hope is that by maintaining a virtual gallery of excellence in church and parish website design, I can help to change that. I now call my database of churches The International Directory of Church Website Design, though I may refer to it as either the directory or the database throughout my site.

Other resources on my site

A virtual gallery of church website design only meets the needs of one of three church "markets," however. Not all churches seek to design their own website. Many just don't have the skilled talent on staff or among their membership to do this. As a result, many churches hire individuals or companies to design websites for them. (This is true of the secular world, also, of course.)

Yet other churches purchase a web Content Management System, which makes maintaining a website easy. A CMS usually includes pre-built design templates, though some CMS vendors will custom design a site for a client.

Therefore, my website now contains a directory for each of these three primary church markets: I maintain the directory of church website design. I maintain a list of companies offering web design and related marketing services. I maintain a directory of vendors of web Content Management Systems. Many though not all of the latter were specifically created for churches.

At the end of 2004, I launched The Church Webmasters' Forum. It's hardly been the largest or most active forum available for church webmasters, yet I maintain the forum to meet the needs of churches. At the end of 2008, the forum includes nearly 4,600 posts. Day and night, there's always a handful of visitors (called "lurkers") reading the posts in the forum. So, it would be a shame, I think, to close the forum.

I noted with sadness the closing in Fall 2008 of the much larger forum at Christian-web-masters.com. The forum has merged with the Geeks & God website. That convinced me to keep my forum going.

Methodology

To find church websites to include in my database, I originally browsed through lists of churches I found on the internet. I did this state by state, and sometimes denomination by denomination, one church after another alphabetically. This was very laborious and time-consuming. It was also prone to much unintentional bias. This was because I found better lists for some denominations, states, and even metro areas than for others. I conducted my research this way from April 2004 to December 2005, after which I took a break. I had added 500 churches to my database, which was plenty.

In March 2007, I purchased a list of the names of 5,000 churches with websites from American Church Lists, a list broker. Now, I've been a Filemaker Pro programmer for a long time. Current versions of Filemaker have a built-in web viewer. By importing the list of churches that I purchased into a Filemaker database, I could much more efficiently research church websites. Again, this is because of the built-in web viewer in the program. Working diligently from March to October 2007, I replaced some 150 churches in my directory with new churches.

During this time, I also started listing in my database interesting or well-done features on the inside pages of church and parish websites (those that I selected for inclusion in my database). I also started adding "tags" that described the home page in some way. The purpose for this was to enable members to find, for example, churches in my database that had put audio on their home page, or that could be considered "colorful," or that were modular in design. I'm going to continue to list home page tags, but have discontinued the practice of highlighting features on inside pages because it's just too time consuming.

After October 2007, I grew too busy with my time-intensive courses taken through The Art Institute Online to continue adding new churches to the directory. (I'm slowly working on an A.A. in web and interactive media design. I already have earned a master's degree in photojournalism, completed years ago.) But in Fall 2008, I took a sabbatical from school to catch up on other projects, including Great Church Websites.

Business considerations

In June 2004, shortly after launching this website, I incorporated Great Church Websites as an Oregon not-for-profit corporation. I intended to eventually seek 501(c)(3) status from the IRS, so that donors to Great Church Websites could be assured that their donations were tax deductible. But from early 2007 to the end of 2008, I moved four times around the Portland, Oregon, metro area. (I've ended up where I started, actually, in a home my wife and I own.) As a result, I failed to pay the required annual state registration fee and now "Great Church Websites" as a corporation is on inactive status. But the website, and the ministry, continues.

From April 2004 (launch) to March 2005, visitors could browse my database for free. But I needed to generate income to pay expenses for the site, such as hosting. I started charging for membership in March 2005 as a result. By mid 2008, I was thinking about how I could make the directory again free to browse. The problem was that, out of honesty and integrity, I felt that I should offer a refund to all current members (with a year membership) if I made the database free to browse again. In Fall 2008, I had accumulated enough advertising revenue that I calculated I could reimburse all members (on a prorated basis) if they all requested a refund. I was good to go.

In October 2008, I announced on my site and by email to current one-year members that I was making the database free to browse again. To the credit of my members, only a handful requested refunds, all of which have been paid. On November 1, 2008, I made the directory again free to browse. (But membership still has its advantages.) In 2009, then, I hope to support the website primarily through advertising.

A switch to web standards compliance

From its beginning in 2004, the HTML coding for my site has been a mix of tables-based and CSS-based layout. For a long time, I wanted to convert my site to fully web standards compliant, CSS-based layout. Starting in November 2008, I began diligently converting pages of my site to fully CSS-based layouts. This actually proved to be very difficult to do, but has been worth the effort. On 1 January 2009, I debuted the revamped site. (Pages of my site do not fully validate, however, because I still use the illegal — for the XHTML Strict doctype that I use — "target = '_blank' " attribute in some links.)

I made the layout of my site wider, also, to accommodate a righthand column. In this column, I am putting articles from Sitepoint, adding new articles on a regular basis. (Sitepoint grants permission to other websites to do this, with appropriate credits and links.) Sitepoint is a large, technically oriented website for web designers. The focus of my website has always been on web design. I'm happy to include content from this much larger site (Sitepoint) on my own site. I encourage church and parish webmasters to make use of Sitepoint's huge resources.

Please considering donating

As discussed, Great Church Website is not a 501(c)(3) organization. It isn't even a not-for-profit corporation at the moment. Nevertheless, please consider making a small donation to Great Church Websites. Even a small donation will help me to pay for expenses I regularly incur to maintain this website. My primary goal for 2009 is to purchase a list of about 15,000 churches with websites for my research. The list will be comprised of mostly U.S. churches, plus Canadian churches, and churches overseas. I expect this will cost about US$1,500 to US$2,000. I'll need a little help raising that kind of money. Use the PayPal button in the lefthand column to donate.

If you have a ministry overseas — perhaps you are a pastor of a church in Africa or India — please don't write asking for funds (or Bibles, etc.) for your church or ministry. I am not able to financially support your church or ministry.

I hope you will find this website to be useful to you in your internet ministry. Comments or questions? Send an email to me using the link below. Or complete my "Contact me" form.

Website last updated: 6 December 2009 | Email: David Gillaspey