A project such as designing a church website is a huge task to undertake. Not only is it huge, it means a lot of responsibility. This responsibility should not be left on the shoulders of one individual. You will want a design team who can work together on a regular basis until the site is completed.
In order to begin working with a design team, there must be one person who will be responsible for the progress of the website. This person will be responsible for answering to higher ups in the organization. They must be involved in every phase of the process. They must be able to clear any roadblocks the team may encounter that they cannot clear themselves.
Stakeholders are another aspect of the team. These are individuals who have a stake in the success of the church website design. This may be the youth coordinator or the pastor himself. Many other members of the congregation may also have a stake in the success of the website as well.
A large church is normally going to have many pages in their church website design. This could be as many as 150 or as few as 30. If the web design gets too large, you may want to consider outsourcing portions of the project to vendors. This means hiring someone to write, get an architecture consultant, someone who does graphic design and so forth. A lot of churches decide to outsource everything except the writing and photography.
It is more expensive to outsource the entire design and usually when that is done, the church gives up a lot of control over the content. Look within the congregation and appeal to your parishioners. You may be surprised to find a graphic designer right in the front pew.
Make sure to keep all channels of communication open. If you have a team of ten that are working on your church website designs, make sure each member is willing and capable of communicating with the other team members in case they encounter a problem. All teams have a project manager and this person should be capable of solving any problems and answering questions concerning the design of the website.
When each individual on the design team is working separately on a project, there still comes a time when all members need to meet to incorporate all the information collected. Some team members may run across questions that cannot be answered any other way but in person. It may require discussion and arbitration to decide some of your dilemmas and a meeting is the only way to do it.
Finally, have a definite but somewhat flexible deadline. By this I mean, set a deadline but make sure it is flexible enough to be pushed back or pulled up. During the construction of your church website design, you or a team member may come across a problem that requires time to resolve. If your deadline is swiftly approaching, it will need to be pushed back to allow adequate time to resolve the problem. If by chance everything goes smoothly and you are ahead of schedule, it is easy to pull the deadline to the forefront and launch early.