Welcome to Great Church Websites

I launched this website in Summer 2004 to provide examples of well-designed church websites in a searchable directory or database. The purpose for this was to provide design inspiration to church and parish webmasters. Over time, I reviewed 14,000 websites and chose the best for inclusion in my directory as reduced-sized screenshots.

I believe that my directory served an important need in the Kingdom. However, it was immensely time-consuming and financially unrewarding to maintain. I closed the directory on 27 July 2009. I will not be updating the directory any longer.

From January 2009 to April 2009, I added a number of new church website examples, with my comments, first to The Church Webmasters' Forum, then to the directory. Those posts are still available by following the mentioned link.

I launched The Church Webmasters' Forum at the end of 2004. It enjoyed slow growth for a few years, but did not sustain that growth. I closed the forum to new posts on 27 July 2009. Visitors may continue to browse the 5,200 posts in the forum archive, however. Follow the link under the banner above to get to the forum home page.

Great Church Websites is not going away, however — just evolving. Over the past few months, I have worked very hard to redesign and expand my directory of companies that offer web design and other marketing services as well as my directory of companies that sell web Content Management Systems (CMS) for churches.

I want to add a Jobs postings area to my website, so churches can advertise for free for salaried church webmasters. (The position might actually be communications director or I.T. director at some churches.) There are few such jobs advertised right now, actually — so this feature will not be an instant success.

I also want to launch an online Church Webmaster's Magazine. This will not be a magazine about web programming languages, Cascading Style Sheets, and the other usual web design subjects. The internet contains vast resources already about these subjects. The magazine will be about how to do internet ministry.

The magazine will contain articles for the following three markets:

Churches that design and maintain their own website.
Churches that hire outside companies to design and in some cases maintain the church's website.
Churches that use a web Content Management System.

Ever since I launched Great Church Websites, I have tried to maintain resources for all three markets.

If you are a church or parish webmaster (volunteer or paid), or work for a web design company, or work for a company that sells a branded web Content Management System, and would like to write for this new magazine, please contact me using the email link below.

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