Regular readers will know that my Church is creating an online presence.
The first aspect of this is our online bookshop – not some two bit addon to what we sell at the back of the coffee lunge on a Sunday morning, but a full blown professionally designed and built eCommerce site. Why? Simply because the Church has run a Christian book import / export business for over ten years now and this is the next natural stepping stone for us.
Due to my various involvements with the Church and my professional life I was put in charge of the web projects and although I’m involving the leadership every step of the way I have been given carte blanche to do “what I think best” and that “Stuart has the last say in anything web related”. Awesome responsibilities and an awesome challenge as well.
Part of the current challenge is in getting our developer to cough up the goods. Some of you will have already seen the “almost complete” eCommerce site. Unfortunately it hasn’t moved on from there as the developer has given every excuse under the sun to not do the work or to prevaricate over doing it. He has one task left – to ensure the payment gateway works, but rather than actually doing it all I appear to be getting is excuses. I’ve started praying for him / the project and have suggested the leadership do so as well.
As a part of all this frustration I’ve been thinking about the occasion when we do actually launch it. Thoughts like:
- what will be our daily / weekly / monthly tasks?
- how can I encourage the Church staff to keep this at the forefront of their thinking?
- how can we make the site look new / different without actually changing the template?
- how often should we change banners / special offers / etc?
Because I work outside of the Church in my professional life I won’t always be there to nudge, cajole and encourage and let’s be honest – eMail simply doesn’t hit the mark with everyone. So my first challenge is to get the leadership to have a monthly meeting (at least) that is solely dedicated to considering the online bookshop. Get them to discuss previous months sales – investigate any feedback – look at what stock to include / exclude – consider what promotional items to run – set challenges for the month ahead – involve the creative chap in designing the rotating banners and so on ….
Apart from these items is there anything else I should be considering?
After all, this is new to me as well.
