Churches should be thinking about ensuring the viability of their website solution far into the future. This means building a web presence on a future-proof solution.

Future-proof means your website will not become obsolete. When we talk about future-proofing your website, we are not talking about the design. At any point you could change the design, and still be using an obsolete website solution. A future-proof church website is able to adapt to your changing needs and adjust as new technology is released.

Here are 4 ways to check if your website solution is future-proof.

1. Can Your Website Grow With You?

If you decide to build your website on an open source platform like WordPress, Drupal etc… what options do you have for growth?

• create a new theme
• install another template theme with more functionality
• add plugins
• develop custom plugins

While you might use the same open source platform, creating new themes and plugins also means you have to re-examine past posts to:

• change the meta tags
• update custom fields
• add new categories
• build custom post type templates

In essence, the platform you are building on doesn’t grow with you. Instead, you have to find a Band-Aid to address your growth because your current system has become obsolete.

At Monk Development, we are able to grow with you. Who Is Grace started with an e360 Theme. Overtime their needs expanded, instead of trying to find a new solution we worked with them on a custom design.The best part, they didn't have to worry about learning a new platform or migrating their content.

I really do love how Ekklesia 360 was able to grow with us. We had a plan from the beginning that we would eventually make the jump to a custom design, so we were careful about how much time and money we put into our theme customization. Even in our most recent discussions, we wanted to make sure this particular manifestation could continue to grow with us. ~ Danielle Hartland, Creative Director at Grace  Church

2. Does Growth Always Lead To A Redesign?

Do you have a plan to expand into multiple locations in a few months or years? Is your open source solution going to expand to help meet your needs or are you going to have to redesign your website? If the answer to your growth is always a redesign, you are probably building on a platform that is not future-proof.

With MonkDev you can start where you are and expand at anytime. We helped City of Grace, when they decided to go multisite. Instead of leading with a complete redesign, we simply added in multisite functionality.

3. When You Add Functionality, Is It Guaranteed To Work For Years To Come?

With open source solutions you can increase the functionality of your site by adding new plugins, which are basically add-ons. They were designed by someone to work with your open source website content management system. Over time they may work, but there is no guarantee they will work with every update of the CMS. A developer might stop updating the plugin, making it obsolete.

At MonkDev we’re constantly creating new ministry focused layouts that can be added to any existing Ekklesia 360 website. These are not add-ons, they were designed to integrate with our CMS and we continue to make advancements on them. As a result, you have the ability to increase the effectiveness and functionality of your website and be assured it will work for years to come.

In fact, we’ve just release two new ministry layouts this month, Live Streaming and New Here.

4. Are you Anticipating the Future?

We have a team of engineers working on our Ekklesia 360 CMS. They are making improvements to anticipate where technology is heading. These updates are rolled out to everyone, which means our CMS is constantly being improved. These updates keep our websites compliant with the latest web standards and ensure all Ekklesia 360 sites are future-proof.

Why Did We Choose To Go Future-Proof?

It comes back to what we do at Monk Development. We're not selling you a website product, instead we're providing Software as a Service (SaaS). We feel this is the best model to meet the growing needs of church websites. It also means we are constantly investing in and improving our content management systems to ensure it is future-proof.

“Simple enough for a church plant, powerful enough for a world wide ministry.”

This statement isn’t just describing who we serve, it also reflects that our Content Management System is “future-proof.” No matter where your church is now and what you hope to do in the future, we will be there to support your needs.

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