Do You Need A Church Webmaster?

Your digital tools play an integral role in helping you fulfill your church’s mission and vision and helping your team reach its full potential.

Your church website is a welcome mat for potential visitors and the first place many people will encounter and explore your church. Your church app is a launch pad for members to get more involved, find important information, tithe, and grow in their faith.

And there’s likely even more to your church’s digital presence. Between your church blog, digital giving, the live stream of your service, event registration, social media channels, and your church app, there’s a lot to keep up with.

So, do you need a full-time staff position to run it all? Should your church hire a “webmaster”?

Probably not.

Here’s why.

Websites and apps are more accessible now

Websites have come a long way since the 90s. They look better. They can do more. But most importantly, they’re easier to maintain and modify. The slightest changes used to require professional help. If your church wanted to update the look and feel of your brand or make sure your staff page was current, someone needed to sit down with the developer who created your site.

Same with mobile apps. Even minor updates were time-consuming and expensive, with lots of back and forth. So it made sense to have an in-house expert who understood the tech and could act as a liaison between your church and your vendor.

But things have changed a lot since then. Now, you can create elegant, custom solutions without learning to code, hiring a developer, or sending a wishlist to your vendor.

Today’s top website and mobile app vendors know that the best way to serve their customers is to create a self-serve model, so people can make changes when and how they want.

With a church app builder, church staff can use templates to choose the features they need and easily design a custom app that fits the look and feel of their church. And making changes is just as simple, with a streamlined backend that lets you jump in and out whenever you need.

This flexibility gives churches a few solid options for keeping their digital presence up-to-date, besides just hiring a webmaster.

Find the right person in your community

Getting someone to manage your website or church app used to mean finding people with the right technical skills and expertise. But that’s not the case anymore. Now churches can focus on finding someone who’s passionate about their digital ministry, or even just someone who has the time and energy to serve the church in this way.

And with modern digital solutions, finding someone who can take this on is even easier because it’s a smaller time commitment. Nobody has to get in and mess with the code or worry about breaking something.

Train people to update their areas

Alternatively, you might decide to have people share the load.

Imagine if everyone came to you every time they needed to Google something. You were the designated “Googler.” It’d be obnoxious because anyone can use Google!

That’s how it should feel when you have a good church app or website—it should be so easy to make changes that anyone can do it. Obviously, you don’t want everyone to have access to edit your website or mobile app, but this doesn’t have to be a responsibility that falls on one person’s shoulders.

When you go through staffing changes, the person who’s already responsible for making staffing changes can just add “update the staff page” to their tasks. If you have a designated person writing devotionals or blog posts, make sure they understand how to do the final step—uploading what they wrote to the website. If someone is setting up an event, maybe they should have access to add the event registration to your app.

Modern church websites and mobile apps are simple enough that no one needs to be a “computer guru” to get things done. So if there are several areas you might need to update regularly, why not delegate those responsibilities to the people they already naturally fall under?

Don’t create a bottleneck

A church webmaster is essentially a middleman between you and your website or app. And when your digital tools are easy to use, that’s a bottleneck that your church doesn’t need. Ready to get a church app but not sure where to start? Don’t take this decision lighlty—whatever app you pick will probably stay with your church for the years to come so you want to choose something that best serves your congregation and your church’s mission.

Discover the strategies you need to use to make excellent church technology decisions and implement an app soon. Download the free Church Technology Buyer’s Guide today!