What is it about the United Church of Canada and ugly web sites? At right is a screen capture of the latest visual atrocity, Of Things United. Click on the thumbnail to view a full-sized image. But I warn you. Staring too long at the image could melt your eyeballs.
I’m of the view that, if you’re a church, it’s better to have no web site than an ugly web site. It is a fact of 21st century life that virtually everybody under the age of 35 who visits a church of their own free will has checked out its web site first. Ugly guarantees a click off the site. Ugly says “church full of old farts.” So the golden demographic, the under 35 set, goes somewhere else. Better to have no web site at all than to have a web site that drives away potential visitors.
Consider how ugly UCC web sites get built in the first place. The fateful sequence of events goes like this: a group of 70-somethings (the average age of your typical UCC church-goer) gets chatting during coffee-time, or fellowship-time, or “I’m in a clique and you’re not” time. Inevitably, one of them remembers the good old days when people were spilling into the aisles and there were 600 kids in Sunday school
“We need more young people.”
“Yep.”
“They’re all on that dubbleya dubbleya dubbleya. That’s where you’ll find all the young people nowadays.”
“We need to be on the dubbleya dubbleya dubbleya too.”
“Yep.”
“Say, Joe, didn’t you just buy a fancy new computer with some fancy new software for making web sites.”
“Yep.”
And so another piece of ugly gets ushered into the world.
Readers may interpret this rant as ageism. It isn’t; it’s microsoftism. For some reason, church farts who don’t know anything about the dubbleya dubbleya dubbleya look to microsoft as a beacon of hope. There’s no explaining it. Let me shout it from a mountaintop: if it was “designed” in Frontpage, if it includes clip art from an image library that installed with your OS, if it was built from a frames-driven out-of-the-box template, IT WILL BE UGLY.
If you don’t know what you’re doing and still insist on having a web site, at least use template-driven CMS (content management system) software. For example, a WordPress blog will do nicely for the needs of most average-sized churches. If you want something with more features and flexibility, use Joomla. Both are free. All you need is a host running a Linux/Unix-based OS and a MySQL database. If that seems intimidating, most web hosts now include one-click installs of cms and blogging software.
Finally, you may be wondering why I get so apoplectic about ugly web sites. In fact, what drives me to apoplexy are ugly religious web sites. I believe that when a community (or person) holds itself out as spiritual, it’s making a claim about the values that drive its living and ground its sense of purpose. These are transcendental values: truth, goodness, justice – and beauty. No one of these is less worthy than the others.
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