I was asked to look at and critique a church website. Before I could give any useful advice or comments, I asked the person who asked me to look at the website,"What is your purpose in creating the site?"
Websites can serve many purposes from outreach to disciple-making. Each purpose takes time and few churches have time to do all of them. Because of that I didn't want to critique the site unfairly. The person who asked me to critique the site said that they wanted primarily to attract and inform unchurched people about the church.
I clicked on the site and on the home page was one of the large format of scrolling picture boxes across the top. The images displayed were of a young woman being helped out of the water of a hot tub, a close up of her smiling with a wet t-shirt clinging tightly to her; then a shot of her as she is hugged by a couple of guys.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry before I commented on the website.