That said, I was thinking more about churches that don’t have techies at their fingertips, though they do have people who are tech-capable. For example, I’m likely to be helping a local church with a pastor who is a PR wonder, but doesn’t have a website. He doesn’t have any tech people in his congregation, but he’s not shy about asking me, and I’m glad to help.

For that group, I’m likely to look for people who are willing to learn some technology so they can do it themselves without me, and together we choose a technology that most suits who they have, as well as their goals.

I also agree with Mark that management buy-in at the front-end is critical. As for budget — I meant to say something about that in my original post, and forgot.

All in all, this is a significantly harder topic to parse than a more nuts-and-bolts one, and so I’m particularly appreciative of comments to flesh the topic out.

Before a kick-off meeting, get some high level buy-in from your pastor and/or council on whether they would support the idea of a website in the first place. Waiting until the meeting is too late. Find out what their top goals are and explore how a website can help meet those. Try to get a sense of what budget you might receive. Knowing if you have $100, $1,000 or $10,000 to work with will focus some of your subsequent hosting and technical discussions.

When brainstorming content ideas with your team, look to your organization’s strategic plan or annual goals to see how a website can fit in. You’ll also want to survey your congregation to see what content they are interested in, which just might be different than what your eager volunteers have in mind.

Regarding domain names, if you have a good one in mind that’s still available then I’d grab it, or at least park it, before the meeting. We lost a good one by a day when a volunteer failed to jump on it in time after a kick-off meeting back in 1998.

Thing about a website for a congregation is that it’s about communication. Who is your target audience? Potential new members? Existing members? Larger UU community interested in your particular church/history? What do you want to say to the various audiences? This is what the church website is all about, everything technology related is entirely secondary of importance. A church website running on the coolest most wonderful software can still have poor content, a compelling message delivered by “bad software” can still be of use to people.

With that said it’s important for a somewhat web savvy person to set reasonable boundries on what can and can not be accomplished on a website, vision will exceed reach. I would have techies at the initial meeting, but make it clear that it’s about vision and not implementation. Once clear goals and objectives had been set, then I would go after techies, graphic artists, etc. to make it happen.