Brian Bailey of the Leave It Behind blog has had a couple of interesting posts about portal websites as it pertains to ministry. Some excerpts:

Most of us remember the portal frenzy in 2000 and 2001, as the internet bubble peaked…site after site attempted to capture user’s attention by becoming a destination….I remember it well because FellowshipChurch.com pursued a similar strategy.

Beginning with our new site launch…we added free email, weather reports, news feeds (not the RSS variety), sports scores, classified ads, movie reviews, meal menus, and stock quotes (yes, stock quotes!). The goal? To become a home away from home, a be-all-end-all portal that would make FellowshipChurch.com the only site our users would need.

Fast forward four years and the only piece left is email, and that for only six more weeks.

And what happened?

We have learned, like most organizations, two principles of the web:

1. Only do what only you can do (or can do better than anyone else)
2. Users will search out the best tools, applications, and content wherever they can find it

I asked Brian how slimming their portal made their site more effective. Graciously he picked up my question in his next post:

Let me be clear that removing features is never easy…In many cases, though, you discover that the specific area of the site is used far less than you imagined, or is used more by other churches than by your own membership. On the web, the greatest indication of this is what kind of feedback do receive when a feature is temporarily unavailable. We’ve had instances when a feature broke and while rushing to fix it we discovered that absolutely no one was complaining. That’s a good time to take a long look. If no one misses it, is it worth the time, effort and resources?

He concludes with some great words to ponder and digest:

Removing these features has had little noticeable impact on our traffic or other measures of web success. Each decision has, however, freed my team to focus on more mission-critical projects, constantly raising the bar on what is a worthwhile undertaking. Everything you say Yes to is by definition a No to something else. We can see clearly now that reasons such as “cool”, “fun”, and “other sites do it” are not reason enough.

Portals are interesting. I’ve noticed that the trend seems to be that if you can’t customize the portal, it’s not worth it. People aren’t surfing anymore. People have a list of about 10 or less websites now they frequent. If they have a question, the search it out. Now with RSS, people are getting news and info the way they want.

I think there’s still a place for portals…if done well. But let’s be honest. People are going to go where they want to go and on the web, it’s really tough to be all things for all people. Most of us are better served to find our niche, fill it, and market it. We’re freeing up our resources and focusing on what we should be focused on. When we do a good job with that, people will find us.

And they’ll come back.