G'day Delwin, and thanks for agreeing to come and share your exciting work with us.

I'm a teacher and teacher educator, and I started building online courses for teachers in 2005. We found that both we as developers and the teachers who were our students kind of defaulted to using the metaphor of a 'virtual school' to understand the various parts of the web site. The Discussion forum was considered to be like the actual classroom, email to be more like a conversation in the teacher's office, and so on.

Maybe 13 years later everyone is just more comfortable treating a web site as a web site, and those enabling metaphors are less important. But I wondered whether perhaps you and those you deal with sometimes still use the metaphor of a 'virtual church' online to think about the various functions the site offers? Is there a 'main sanctuary' area, and perhaps adult Sabbath School, kids Sabbath School, foyer and so on areas?

Hello Bravus:

Hmmm...I haven't really given it much thought, to be honest with you. Our current website is largely used by people who want to access the live web stream and the archived sermons/Sabbath School content. So I suppose that the metaphor for our current website is that of a "church" as in, this is how I go to church. Since we really don't have anything else going on with our current website, there is no Sabbath School section (unless you count the Hope Sabbath School content, which is posted with the sermons) and nothing else in the way of a foyer, or children's wing and so forth.

Currently a lot of the connections to our worship services, people and various events is happening via our church photo gallery, which is linked to from our website, but actually hosted elsewhere. That website uses a photo gallery metaphor and gets a very high amount of traffic (as many as 10-15,000 views/week).

With our upcoming redesigned website I have plans to bring a lot of the various websites that we have under one roof, so to speak, but I plan to stick to more of a web portal type of model with a main home page that highlights the various content sections and events and then links off to those various subsections.

I think that with the near-universality of the Internet I don't really see a great need to replicate the physical church building metaphor within our website. I think most people get what a website is like and as long as the navigation is clear enough they can pretty much find their way around to what they want. And since the video and audio content is posted there, they experience "church" as they join us online or via archived content.

As for being a "virtual church" we really haven't employed that metaphor either. One thing that we have been intentional about from the beginning is that we are not a virtual church in the sense of being a replacement for church. By that I mean that we don't try to replicate a church service online--we stream what is already happening in our worship services. If our Internet connection goes down the church service in the sanctuary will go on without a moment's hesitation (the congregation wouldn't even know the difference). So for this reason, the virtual church metaphor doesn't really work or apply to us.

Thanks for an very interesting question...

--delwin