At the words "Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer", I'd meant to link here.

1. To find out Mass and confession times
2. To find out about upcoming events

I'd be willing to bet that a not insignificant percentage of people who visit parish websites do so for the same primary reasons.

In my opinion, then, a parish website should display these things on their home page in such a way that they're impossible to miss.

Now, on the other hand, I have numerous pet peeves about certain website features generally, which I think should be avoided. Here's a partial list:

1. Intro pages — useability studies consistently show people don't like them.

2. Pages/features that don't load properly in Firefox (due to the webmaster only testing them in IE). Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer.

3. Flash animation — it's annoying. Plus, for users who have Flash Block (a Firefox add-on), it doesn't show up.

4. Playing music (even if it's good music) immediately upon opening a page — far more annoying than Flash animation.

5. Dead links due to the webmaster moving a page and failing to include redirect code on the old page — I'm also told this is one of the cardinal sins of web design. This has happened to me twice recently whilst looking for articles on Catholic Exchange, and I find it maddening. (After that I tried the Wayback Machine, but struck out there too.)

Just my $.02.

Here's what I like about ours right now:

- Good range of info for those looking into our church

- Once logged in, parishioners can access the full parish directory, explore their neighborhood to find other parishioners that live near them, explore parish listings by classified-type "Tags" to find other parishioners that do various types of work or have various types of knowledge. They can also perform various parish tasks online, like booking meeting and conference spaces, updating organizations' news, info, and documents for parish organizations in which they have leadership roles, etc.

- Parishioners can also explore preparatory material for upcoming weekends' Masses, including the readings, reflections by parishioners in various states of life on the readings, etc.

Here's where we want to be better at in the future:

- Weekly email to all online parishioners with the digital version of the parish bulletin, reflections for the upcoming weekend's Mass readings, info of particular interest to the online users, etc.

- Streaming and podcasts of homilies for the homebound, the traveling, etc. (we've started recording in the last few weeks and are a few weeks from launching this.)

- Segmenting more of the "parishioner only info" that also makes sense to make available to the anonymous site visitor, and making it available as appropriate.

We look at the website as a "Virtual Gathering Space" for the parish and use it to try to anchor as many people as possible that are online and parishioners in parish life through as much of the week as possible, in an effort to get and keep them more involved in the parish as the center of their life.

Again, I'd love to hear others' feedback, and what they perceive as "goods" and "bads" of parish website, to assimilate into our own work here.