Church 2.0: A study of church web development

Religion is ever present in American culture and on the Internet, and as the Internet shifts from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, churches must reexamine how their web sites address the needs and desires of their audiences. In this project, the researcher studies members of LifePoint Church and their use of the church’s web site, church web developers’ methods and attitudes toward church web development, and the web sites of LifePoint’s competitors for the purpose of deciding whether LifePoint should embrace Web 2.0. The researcher applies the results of the three mini-studies to the seven characteristics of Web 2.0: Web as platform, collective intelligence, perpetual beta, specialized databases, lightweight services, device outgrowth, and rich user experiences and concludes that Web 2.0 is indeed worth embracing on LifePoint Online.