Making a major change to your staff can be a very exciting time for your church. Your carefully formed team is what makes all the magic happen behind the scenes between each Sunday service. After many hours of working together, you may even feel like you’ve formed a family-like bond among your staff.
If your church is growing (and we hope it is!), you will be adding to your church staff family, and your new team member is sure to bring a new contributions to the table.
Many churches will hire a someone to handle their church website and online communication. Considering how much extra work that entails, it’s a very smart move! With this new leadership it can be hard to effectively and seamlessly revamp your church website.
As you add new staff to your church family, here are some steps to follow as you work through your website changes.
Run an Audit
Running an audit doesn't exactly sound like a barrel of fun, but it can be interesting and extremely important when someone new takes over the church website. Some questions you may want to ask when conducting an audit include:
- What does the website need?
- What needs to change first? What can be made last?
- Is the website doing what's expected of it? (Attracting visitors, keeping members updated, etc.)
- What pages does your current website have? What pages do you need or want? Are those lists the same?
Doing an audit will help your new addition get up to speed on the purpose of the website and how well it's working. It will also offer the new staff member a chance to give any feedback and suggest possible changes.
Open Up the Conversation to Everyone
Before this new person joined the team, most of the rest of your staff probably had a hand in everything. By opening up the conversation to everyone, you can get everyone's thoughts and opinions. You can also learn where everyone might want to contribute. For example, there may be a few gifted writers on the staff who want to try their hand at writing copy on a few website pages. Maybe someone else who enjoys photography will want to be in charge of getting updated photographs for the website. You will never know who might be willing to step up to the plate if you assume the same people will do the same tasks they've always done. For the person who has just been hired, you'll want to ensure that the rest of the team has have plenty of opportunities to ask questions. Make sure everyone knows their feedback is valuable.
Determine Roles
Now that you have this new person on your staff and all this input from your team, it’s especially important to determine exactly what everyone's role is. You'll want to do everything you can to alleviate any confusion. Will your new staff member handle just the design? Will they be maintaining the blog and the rest of the communications? What exactly do they have to do? The last thing you want to happen is for them to go into this position thinking one thing and being surprised with new jobs, or even not meet their expectations.
Don’t Step on Their Toes
They’re new, so they’ll need some help at first. But don’t overstep your boundaries once roles are established. If you are a leader who has always been prone to micro-managing, you will have to fight off that urge. It's important to listen to their ideas and help them to know that their thoughts matter. It's equally important to make it clear to them what they are expected to achieve and within what time frame they are to complete certain tasks. While you want to offer guidance, you don't want to get in their way.
You’re Not Going to Do Everything in 4 Months
This new person is going to have a lot to do, especially at the beginning. Realistically, there will be so many changes happening that it’s going to take a long period of time. You’re not going to get everything done in just 4 months, it can take upwards of a year!
A great place to start can be with your church logo, followed by your church colors, etc. These pieces will lead to your brand identity and give direction for your church website. Another key thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to launch the whole thing in one go. It’s okay to launch just the homepage, the about, and service times page. For pages that are still a work in progress it's quite all right to leave them unpublished and untouched for a while and update the page when it is ready. You will however, need to be careful about keeping some consistency during this church website revamp marathon. For example, keep the footer the same on every page and make sure it's the same logo on every page if you have chosen to change the logo, etc.
