The best youth ministry website in the world doesn’t exist … yet.

But if I was given the task of designing it, I’ve got a few ideas to make it work. Here’s the idea:

In short, the basic look and feel would be cool but easily interchangeable. Content is king so style is present but can change with every reload of the page (maybe it loads graphics from each of the 5 schools you primarily minister to?) or at least seasonally (new theme 4x a year?). The front page is a portal, designed to help guide people in our discipleship process, which in our case is the purposes. So there is a ‘latest news’ bucket, with headlines from all areas, and a specific bucket for each purpose as well. It should visually demonstrate where a student might first visit our church and navigate intuitively toward spiritual maturity. So there’s a checking-us-out-entry-level-starting-point that then moves people in each next step of commitment – small groups, growing on their own, serving and missions.

When you click on any post, there are three tabs that target different audiences who might be reading the same information.

• The first tab, which is set by default, displays student Information. If the post is for a discipleship retreat, it gives the basics of the event, cost and the option to register right there online. Maybe you can even do some limited searching and see who else is going to make sure your friends are in, too.
• The second tab is set for parent/volunteer Information. It lists emergency contact information, links to real-time blogs and Twitters of the event, and allows parents to get a fuller scope of the event with a more detailed schedule, a cost-breakdown of where your money is going, scholarship information and also allows volunteers to get that detailed info too and sign up for it online.
• The third tab contains all of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes to share with other churches. In this example, you could download a budget template, a speaker contract, release forms, videos and more. Everything we used in pulling off the event/activity/series would be posted in that third tab for download or purchase.

Couple of asides: there would maybe still be a “store” of sorts – a clearinghouse for all of the resource your church is now creating, and a section for parents and volunteers that collects all of the information and puts it in their own pages. These would all be secondary though, to the tabbed approach. Everything is tied into one central database, with 3 large input fields for each event. When you add a “product” it is associated with the posts about that event/resource. The system would have to tie into Facebook and texting (and whatever’s next) so when we post it also gets immediately sent to phones and shot out to social media.

So let’s say we do an overnight event. We post about it on the blog, and students can get the information they need and register online. They can watch a promo video and maybe there’s a link to send it to their friends or “post this to MySpace” option. The parent tab shows where we’ll be throughout the night, even including GPS monitoring of the front vehicle using Mobile Locator – think Flight Tracker for your youth event. Then in the youth minstry tab, you can download everything we used for event – the volunteer training, the registration forms, promo videos, teaching and more.

Let’s say we post a weekend in review for HSM. For students, it is a recap of the teaching and some video clips of the service embedded on the page. In the parent/volunteer section you can watch the services live or download a “Talk it Over” lesson where parents can engage students in what they learned at church or small group leaders can discuss during the week with their students. The final tab contains hi-res copies of all of the videos we used (if we created them you can buy them there, if we got them from another site it has the links to where you can get them), the program sheets and the teaching outlines, all in nearly real time. Uploading a sermon to the site also automatically uploads it to VideoTeaching, YouTube and Blip.

That my friends, is what I think could make for the best youth ministry site in the world. You could do a stripped down version for your needs, or add upgrades to make it even more robust. So what am I missing?

JG