Author: Ben Meredith

As somebody who is contemplating getting into freelance website design, this may be a bit of a marketing mistake for me, but:

You might not need a web page.

In fact, until you can give me a clear vision for how your website is going to be used, who the target audience is, and how it directly functions alongside your ministry’s offline objectives, you are not ready to have a website built.

90% of the time, what folks tell me they want out of a website could be better accomplished (and for free or virtually free) with a concentrated facebook campaign.

Unless you are into content creation online (blogging, vlogging, podcating, etc) and therefore need to “own” your content, you don’t need a webpage.  If you want to create a space where members in your organization can discuss, interact, get a feel for the distinctives of your group, and be digitally introduced to you, you can often do it with a facebook page far better than with a webpage.  Why? because your members are already on facebook.  Stats are coming out every day on how often folks are visiting facebook.  All of them agree: people are on facebook a LOT.

Why try and get them to leave facebook to come to your site?  What can your site do that facebook can’t or doesn’t?  Until you can answer those questions (and I don’t mean to insinuate there are no valid answers to those questions–you are reading this on a non-facebook site), your money and time would be better spent formulating strategy for your online presence.

Once you have answered those questions, then dump money into the project.  But just like you wouldn’t spend $3,000 on sound equipment without a clear vision for how that equipment is being used, you shouldn’t spend a dime on web design until you have a plan.

But once you do have a plan, and if you find that plan includes a need to branch away from facebook, don’t skimp on the web design.  Pay a good designer good money to develop a site that does exactly what you want.  There’s a reason a good designer can pull in $3,000-$9,000 per website.  You get what you pay for.  And with all due respect to the kid from your church that can design a site for $35, he’s not an expert.  Hire an expert with proven skills and results.  Find someone who has done what you want to do (google it) and find out who designed their stuff.

But you have to convince me you need a website in the first place.

What am I missing? Am I way off base?

If I could draw a 3-5 mile circle around my house on a map, and then facebook/twitter/foursquare/gowalla would never report my exact location inside that circle, I’d be way more comfortable with location-based stuff.

I just don’t want to make it easy for folks to find out where I live, so that when I tweet about not being home I invite robbers/vandals.  I know, you can find my address online (though I’ve personally gone to some length to try and make it more difficult, and if you do find a spot that has my address online, I’d love to know about it…) but I just don’t want every 5th tweet to be geotagged with my home address.

Can somebody make that happen?  I’m eager to share my location when I am away from home.  But I am not going to turn on and off location-based applications every time I leave the house or come home.  It can’t be that hard to develop a “safe zone” that just tells people that I am in the town, without sharing my precise location.