Hey, don’t take it personally, but we thought we should tell you before somebody less friendly does: Church Websites Suck.

In our experience, churches don't seem to have the resources, financial or otherwise, to put together a decent website that gets the message out about who they are, where/when they meet and what they do.

Why is that? Doesn't our Father own all the cattle on a thousand hills (Ps 50:10)? We figure cows must not know how to work a mouse... either that or no one has stepped up to the plate and accepted the challenge.

Generally, a church board gets together and elects some poor schmuck with a copy of FrontPage® to hack something together. If it's not that, then they elect a committee to argue about it for months. The results, as we all know, are typically misdirected, mismanaged and unattractive.

That's where we come in. YuEnvision, in cooperation with Kramer & Associates and Schoolwave, are launching a new initiative to provide information design, visual design and development consultation to local churches in the Muskegon/Grand Haven, Michigan area... free of charge. That oughta work into your budget.

"Free? Nothing's free. There's a catch."

Right you are.

Here's the catch: upon accepting our services you agree to host your church's site with yuEnvision for at least one year. Hosting contracts are $120 a year and include 5 custom email addresses. Also, you agree to allow us to put our small three-square signature at the bottom of every page (similar to the one at the bottom of this page), giving us the design credits.

"What kinds of sites are you going to build for free?"

You'll get a custom-designed, slick-looking static template HTML site (each page will look roughly the same) with no more than 15 pages, including a contact form that will send an email to the address(es) of your choice.

"Who's going to edit the site? Are you going to charge us to make changes?"

You will be responsible to edit your own site. We're taking a hands-off approach. Once we've put the site live, the rest is up to you. If you don't have someone on staff or in your congregation competent to work with the HTML code proficiently, we advise that your church purchase a copy of Adobe Contribute, an inexpensive and easy-to-learn software package that will enable someone on your staff to easily edit the site content. We'll be happy to let you buy us lunch so we can spend an hour or so helping you get set up and teaching you how to edit your site like a pro.

"How are you going to pick which churches you're going to help?"

Churches can apply for consideration via the online form. From there, our professionals will assess the need and set up a brief meeting with the pastor and/or the church leadership-board to discuss that need in detail. We'll make our decision based on that information. We will notify each applicant and let them know whether or not they have been selected for the project.

"Why are you doing this?"

We believe that in this day and age, part of the great commission to "go and make disciples" extends to the web. There's a young audience out there that needs to be reached and one of the easiest ways to do that is by helping the local church initiate and maintain a useful web-presence. We're just doing our part.

"You're just doing this as a giant tax write-off, aren't you?"

No. The majority of this initiative is service-oriented. There is no tax-benefit for services donated. That means that if we spend 100 hours on your project, in the end, when we deliver it on a CD, we can write-off about 39 cents for the CD on which the files were burned.

"Wait! We have so many questions!"

We know. If you make it through the application process, we'll schedule a meeting with you and answer all your questions then...