Design by committee
It’s not unusual for the a church to want to design a web site using a committee. Now I’m all for involving as many people as possible in the ministry of a church but sometimes this committee thing can go too far. Have you ever tried to pick a carpet by committee? I have and it doesn’t work. It isn’t long before you end up having to deal with church politics and peoples sensitives if you try design by committee.
When it comes to websites its better to let the committee pick the overall philosophies and then hand the project over to one or two people who know what they are talking about. You can always run the final design past a committee just to be sure but the smaller the committee the better.
One of the problems is that most people like shiny flashy things to look at and so they pick a design based on how many big pictures it has and not on whether it will work. It is a bit like designing a building to have a beautiful facade with nothing to actually live in. Marketing people are the worst in the world by reputation for this approach so be wary of anyone in marketing who volunteers for the committee.
Anyway we could spend a long time on this issue (committees have a terrible habit of using up your time on pointless things) so I’m not going to say much more. You know this is a problem so try to avoid it.
