by Emily Morgan, Worship Times
When was the last time you saw an ugly website? Like, a really ugly website? What was the website for? A business? A community event? Maybe a church?
Let me tell you, there are a lot of ugly church websites. Outdated, stagnant, rotating gifs, you name it. It’s a running joke within many church communities about how bad their website is. Three years ago Michael Gyura and the web design professionals at Poka Yoke Design decided that they had seen enough ugly church websites.
Worship Times was launched in the spring of 2011 as a joint venture between Poka Yoke Design, people in training to become church professionals, and pastors to meet the growing online needs of churches and church-based nonprofits. With most the staff coming from ministry backgrounds, we know the importance of an online presence to churches and nonprofits in the 21st century.
Churches and nonprofits don’t function the same way as businesses and neither should our websites.
Although the company builds websites, we’re also growing an organic community. We realized that a sustainable model of website design for churches, especially smaller ones, must use the strengths and talents of everyone possible. Scripture speaks of faithful communities as various parts of a single body–we may have different functions but we are all in this together. Members of our community combine their resources with others across the world so we can build cost efficient websites together.
We have found many partners in our journey. We use the open source WordPress content management system so thousands of people are helping us develop better and better ways to be in community online. We work with denominations such as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to provide bulk discounts for fledgling communities. We hired three new staff members in the past year and are continuing to expand our services.
Our goal is simple–we don’t want any church’s website to be the butt of a running joke. We create economically sustainable, user friendly, not ugly websites for churches in a community that will support these ministries for years to come.
Note: This is part of a series of posts from our sponsors. Check out the theme showcase from Worship Times.