Jargon, those insider terms that are only meaningful to members of an "in" group, in this case, those of us in the church can be deadly in terms of our success in communicating with the world outside the church. It's easy forget what a powerful tool the web is for reaching our world, or that many people who visit your church for the first time do so because of your website. With the importance of the website in outreach, even in how we use jargon and fine-tuning it out can make an importance difference.

With that in mind, I just finished a brief overview of websites and following are a few notes on some instances of jargon that stood out to me. We know church jargon can be deadly in the other communications we create in the church, but somehow I think it's easy to miss jargon on the website because the medium itself is newer. Though the websites I looked at all had overall great images and content, the desire to be brief in the number of primary menu items used on the home page, made the jargon in them glaring to me. But if this is the first place a visitor looks and if the primary menu items contain one or more examples of church jargon, this may confuse or stop a visitor.

What's tricky here is that it’s almost impossible to catch this yourself on this because those of us who work in the church are so immersed in church jargon we aren’t even aware of it when we use it or we may not realize that people outside the church may not use that word in the same way. Here a few examples (far from exhaustive) of terms or the locations we put them in that we might want to reconsider: [Read more...]