Guidelines for inclusion in my list of service providers

(See list here.)

This page is obviously addressed to website design companies, not church webmasters.

Listings are free (to companies), but your company's corporate website generally must adhere to these simple guidelines:

Your corporate website must include address (street or P.O. Box number, city, state or province, and postal code) and phone number(s).

Reason: Church websites should include this important information, preferably on the home page. If you don't have the good sense to put this important information on your own corporate website (somewhere, at least), then I don't have the confidence you'll include it on any church websites that your company designs. Note that I do not insist upon there being an email address on your corporate website. In fact, I don't include email addresses in the listings. This is so that I don't unintentionally help spammers harvest your email address.

Your corporate website must provide information about your services, and the information should be easy to find.

Reason: Church websites should include information about the church and about the Christian faith. If I have to hunt around your corporate website to figure out what is that you do, then I don't have the confidence you'll include this important information on any church websites that your company designs, and ensure that it's easy to find.

You must have church websites in your "portfolio" that I like. Their designs ought to be sufficient to make them worthy for inclusion in The International Directory of Church Website Design, of which I am editor — even if I don't choose to include them. (Added 26 June 2007.)

Reason: My list of web services providers is a "select" list and not open to everyone. I want to ensure that listees do quality work.

Information on your corporate website must be legible and readable.

If your corporate website is a Flash site with unreadable 6 point body type (for example), then I don't have the confidence you'll design church websites that are legible and readable.

Keep in mind that visitors to your corporate website want information about your company and might be willing to struggle with reading small, illegible body type on your website. However, churches hope and expect to have visitors to their website who come with their personal defense barriers up already. (That is, they're already suspicious of churches and Christianity.) If they can't read the information on a church website, and easily, they'll be gone in seconds.

Finally, your company must provide one or more of the following services:

Animation (by this, I mean more than just moving photos in Flash, or transitions between photos in Flash); brand/identity development; content management; database programming; e-commerce; Flash programming; graphic design; marketing services; motion graphics; multimedia development; on-site broadcasting; print design; streaming services; video editing, video effects, or video production; web application development, web hosting, or web programming; and website design. I'm certainly open to including other services. Generally, I prefer to list a dozen or fewer services per company, for space reasons.

But it must provide website design services to be included at all. (My website is about website design, after all!)

These are the guidelines as of 26 June 2007. I reserve the right to add or modify these guidelines.

Note that quite a few of my original list of web services providers (obtained from my review of more than 11,000 church websites) — about half — were omitted for the above reasons. So I really can call this a "select" list of service providers.

Want to be on the list? Assuming your corporate site meets the guidelines above, then send me an email using the link below. As stated above, listings are free to the companies included on the list. This is so that I can avoid any appearance of bias in my review of church websites.