Website maintenance should resemble the procedures your organization uses to handle printed matter. For example, if your newsletter is produced by paid staff members, then consider allocating the resources for staff to maintain the website as well. Getting the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain a website shouldn't be much more difficult than the skills and knowledge for creating a newsletter (maybe not now, but probably in the near future).

Many congregations rely heavily on one or two volunteers to maintain their site--usually the same person or people who proposed and created it. But if you have approached the website as an organization up to this point, you've probably attracted several people to the project, and you've designed a site that your congregation can maintain easily with its given resources.

Assuming you have sufficient human resources, then the concern is coordination of effort. If you have pages that need to be updated weekly, for instance, make sure that the person or people who are responsible for updating the pages get the necessary information in a timely fashion, just as your congregation would do with information for bulletins, newsletters, and other printed matter.

Another common concern among congregations is the perception that if you're not a computer savvy person, you can't help out on the website. That concern must be overcome for the website to be an organizational success. Find ways for people who don't necessarily have technical skills to participate. For example, if some of the people who want to be involved in your website project have access to the web but don't have the technical skills to help update the pages, then assign them the task of checking the website on a regular basis. They can proofread updates, check to make sure that links from your pages are still working, or simply make sure that your server is up and running correctly. Get creative here.

You might also work out some means of making new versions of the website available to select people before they are published. It can be very embarrassing to proof the "live" version of the website. One idea is to place new versions in a password-protected sub-directory on the web server. Then, when you ask people to give you feedback, you can give them the location and the login information. You may even need to implement a low-tech method, such as copying all the site files to diskette and passing it to people to test from diskette before you publish it.

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